ON SATURDAY 27 March 2021, two detectives from the Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB) paid a visit to Chain Wen Wei, an English language student from Malaysia. The pair told her that, since she had been refused permission to enter Ireland under the Immigration Act but remained in the country, she could be arrested, detained and deported if she didn’t leave voluntarily.
Solid police work, you might think. The only problem: Wei was appealing against the refusal of permission to enter, and the GNIB had agreed the day before, in court, that it would not take action against her while the legal process took its course.
The Gardai nevertheless told Wei that “it was fine if [she] was appealing but that [she] was getting a deportation order”. They added that “she should not have gone to court; and that her solicitor was just interested in money”. An appalled High Court judge, Ms Justice Burns, described this as “shocking. It is a fundamental requirement within a democracy that all persons are entitled to legal assistance and advice”.
“The Court, she added, “can only hope that that is the case and that events of this nature are an aberration in terms of how An Garda Siochana conduct their business”.
A Garda spokesperson told The Journal that a review of the incident is underway “with a view to establishing lessons to be learned and amending relevant Garda Síochána policy and procedures, if appropriate”.
NGOs working with migrants say that the Gardai, and the State more generally, have plenty of lessons to learn in terms of how migrants are treated. In August, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission released a report pointing to “negative attitudes amongst Garda members towards minority ethnic groups”. (Ethnic minorities are not necessarily immigrants, of course, but there will be overlap.)
The report also complained of “racial profiling” — an issue often raised when it comes to GNIB immigration checks on the Northern Ireland land border.
The Committee on the Administration of Justice has said that “witness and victim testimony indicates that these checks are frequently conducted on the basis of (at times quite blatant) racial profiling”.
One such witness testimony, passed to The Journal by the End Deportations Belfast campaign group, said: “Guards asked ID from all passengers – some white people did not have ID and were OK. 4 people of colour asked to step off the coach and take their luggage with them. Guards took them to their car and our bus has gone”.
That said, the enforcement of immigration laws is quite relaxed in some ways. Ireland has a relatively high non-enforcement rate of deportation orders. 363 people were deported last year, while another 261 left voluntarily.
Some countries routinely lock migrants up in preparation for deportation or removal, a practice known as immigration detention. “Compared to other EU countries, Ireland does not detain large numbers of migrants and asylum seekers — typically less than a dozen people at any given moment”, according to the Global Detention Project.
The major complaint when it comes to detention is the lack of a dedicated detention centre. Migrants who may have committed no crime are instead held in Garda stations or prisons.
Last year, a Chilean woman was held in solitary confinement in the women’s section of Mountjoy Prison for nearly two weeks – despite people from Chile not reqiuring visas to enter Ireland. “She was detained with murderers”, says her solicitor Wendy Lyon.
The Guards are the enforcement arm of the immigration system, but they don’t issue visas or set policies. With the exception of work permits, that’s down to Immigration Service Delivery (called until recently the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service), which like GNIB is ultimately overseen by the Department of Justice.
A DOJ spokesperson said that “the Department is committed to treating those who seek refuge on our shores, or to make a new home for themselves in ours, with respect”.
That’s not everyone’s experience. Serena, whose husband is Egyptian and initially undocumented, says that dealing with the immigration authorities has been infuriating.
“It’s really not about saying visas need to be handed out more”, she explains. “I understand dealing with undocumented people it has to be a difficult process because I don’t believe in a free for all… but it’s the system after a person has been granted permission.”
“As we married this year my husband is now a father of two Irish children and the spouse of an Irish citizen and should theoretically be entitled to a three-year visa, not one year like we have been getting since 2016”.
“We have proof we are living together since 2014, he is on both my children’s birth certificates, I have school and doctors’ letters that he is an active father. He is in employment. Yet again they for no explainable reason said ‘Yes we know you’re married now and should get 3 years but on this occasion we’re just giving you a year’… and stamped his stuff and walked off.
“I burst into tears and next year I’ll be doing this same rigmarole again”.
For those still undocumented, a forthcoming amnesty (aka regularisation scheme) is good news, up to a point. Asylum seekers in the controversial D irect Provision system of institutional accommodation also have reasons to be cheerful, in principle: it’s due to be phased out by 2024.
But campaigner Bulelani Mfaco isn’t optimistic.
“While the commitment to end Direct Provision was met with excitement from asylum seekers and campaigners, much of that fanfare has slowly turned into despair”, he tells The Journal. The Immigrant Council of Ireland agrees that there’s been a “lack of progress” in this area.
Direct Provision would be a less pressing issue if decisions on whether someone should get refugee status didn’t take so long. Long waits for asylum, visa and citizenship decisions were raised by pretty much everyone consulted for this article.
The DOJ accepts that “there have been some unavoidable delays as a result of public health measures” but insists that it “responded quickly and creatively throughout the year so that our immigration services not only continued but adapted and improved”.
“There are delays across the system. They’re very bad in pretty much every area”, counters immigration solicitor Wendy Lyon. “Covid made things worse, but it was always bad”.
Professor Patricia Brazil of Trinity College worries that the rising backlog of asylum cases threatens to undo recent progress.
“Twenty years ago there were endemic issues in the area of asylum decision-making, but in the past ten years there has been a clear commitment to making real and positive changes, which are very welcome”, she says. “However, resources are always an issue and there is a growing backlog once again in processing protection applications”.
The exception seems to be work permits, which unlike most other immigration issues are handled by the business department.
“The Department or Enterprise, Trade and Employment certainly runs more efficiently”, says Carol Sinnott of Sinnott Solicitors. “In comparison to the extraordinary delays that our clients have experienced in receiving decisions in respect of various Immigration applications such as citizenship applications, long stay visa applications and applications to join EU family members in the State to name but a few, we have not encountered any similar extraordinary delays in obtaining work permits”.
But it’s all relative: the processing time for employment permits is still three months. Speeding things up across the board would take a lot of the sting out of criticism of the Irish immigration system.
More consistency would help too. “The quality of individual decisions, for example on visa and EU Treaty Rights applications, varies widely”, Brazil says.
Serena, at the sharp end, agrees. “There is no uniformity in their decisions and they never ever have to explain themselves or be transparent on why they refuse people”, she complains. “One person in an identical situation to another can get everything: visa, passport the lot. The other will be refused at every turn and they will never tell you why, hiding behind ‘it’s a case by case decision’. That’s the most frustrating part”.
Lyon reckons that where you’re from matters more than it should. “People from places like Bangladesh, even if they’re applying for an employment permit, will still be treated worse than an American applying for an employment permit… there’s a culture of suspicion”.
Overall, though, most complaints tend to centre around what you might call “customer service”. In addition to delays and inconsistency, the Immigrant Council cites technical problems with online visa renewals; difficulty securing in-person appointments at Burgh Quay; and vital documents getting lost in the post.
The DOJ says it’s on the case. “People who use our immigration service rightly expect our processes to be personalised, timely and responsive and the Department has implemented many initiatives across our immigration service in order to meet this expectation These include the introduction of an online process for the renewal of registrations; pre-clearance schemes to allow customers to apply for residence permissions prior to travelling; the introduction of online forms and payments; renewed focus on eliminating processing backlogs in key areas; and working towards the delivery of a new, more user-friendly website”.
The department also stresses that “Ireland benefits economically, socially and culturally from the diversity brought to our country by those who choose to travel here to visit, to study, to work and to live”.
For many individual immigrants, the boring operational grind of processing their cases efficiently is much more important than the warm words.
This work is co-funded by Journal Media and a grant programme from the European Parliament. Any opinions or conclusions expressed in this work is the author’s own. The European Parliament has no involvement in nor responsibility for the editorial content published by the project. For more information, see here.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say