23 January 2010

Cc.
Prof. Moshe Justman, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Dr. Neve Gordon, Chairman of the Department of Politics and Government
Staff
Ms Anne Berkeley, Liaison Officer to the Board of Governors

Dear Prof Carmi,

We, Israeli, Palestinian and British academics, are writing to express our deep concern at the treatment of Dr Ahmad Sa’di, a Senior Lecturer at Ben-Gurion University’s Department of Politics and Government, who was subjected to racist treatment on 3 January 2010 when he arrived at Ben-Gurion University train station, as he does every teaching week.  He was humiliatingly searched, yelled at and embarrassed by the security staff at Mexico Gate, which we find offensive and unacceptable.We believe that Dr Sa’di’s reaction on the date was exemplary; he did not block the entrance nor did he insult the security staff.

Following the incident Dr Sa’di complained to the university authorities on 3 January 2010 and again on 10 January 2010. Dr Sa’di strongly believes that his treatment at Mexico Gate on 3 January was only the last in a whole series of racist encounters and harassment he has faced in the past ten years of his employment at Ben-Gurion University. Other incidents included his car being stopped, his bags searched and security staff making calls to ascertain whether he should be allowed to enter the university.

We are extremely concerned that Dr Sa’di’s formal complaint about his treatment on 3 January has neither been looked into seriously by Ben-Gurion University nor been met with anything like a response that it requires from your institution’s senior management. Although Ben-Gurion University acknowledges that Dr Sa’di was insulted and humiliated on 3 January, no further disciplinary action were pursued.

Ben-Gurion University claims to be like other European universities. Yet the response by Ben-Gurion University is another indication of an entirely different sort of system where racism is accepted as routine.  Had a complaint of this nature been made in the UK, there would have been automatic suspension with pay of the individuals involved.  This would then be followed by an investigation by the university department of Human Resources. Yet the fact that Dr Sa’di complaint of racism was dismissed, almost instantly, by the Director of the Department of Security says volumes about your attitude to racism.  You simply are not taking this complaint of racism seriously and we emphatically object.
We also believe that Dr Sa’di’s treatment by Ben-Gurion University is very typical of a wide range of experiences of racist encounters made by Palestinian citizens of Israel, in their face to face, day in and day out confrontations with your security.  This makes life near impossible for many Palestinian academics teaching for Israeli institutions.  It also makes travel to international conferences difficult.  Academics moving in and out of other Israeli institutions have similar experiences to those of Dr Sa’di’s.  It is this that we find so appalling.  It dehumanises those who do some of the very best work.

We call on Ben-Gurion University to take measures preventing further harassment of Dr Sa’di and we hope you realise that such racist treatment and the lack of any serious redress by senior management at Ben-Gurion seriously damages the reputation of your institution and offends the international family of academics to the core.

Sincerely,

Signed by

Professor Avi Shlaim, Oxford University, UK
Professor Nur Masalha, St Mary’s University College, UK
Dr Ronit Lentin, Trinity College, University of Dublin, Ireland
Dr Paul Kelemen, University of Manchester, UK
Keith Hammond, Glasgow University, Scotland
Professor Nira Yuval-Davis, University of East London, UK
Professor Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University, New York, US
Professor Gabriel Piterberg, UCLA, US
Dr Nadje Al-Ali, SOAS, University of London, UK
Professor Ilan Pappe, Exeter University, UK
Professor Elia Zureik, Queen’s University, Canada
Dr Laleh Khalili, SOAS, University of London, UK
Dr Stephanie Cronin, Oxford University, UK
Professor Mary Grey, St Mary’s University College, UK

Introduction

‘Only one world… Let foreigners teach us at least to become foreign to ourselves, to project ourselves sufficiently out of ourselves to no longer be captive to this long Western and white history that has come to an end, and from which nothing more can be expected than sterility and war. Against this catastrophic and nihilistic expectation of a security state, let us greet the foreignness of tomorrow’ (Alain Badiou, 2008: 70)

‘If the world cannot be changed, the (neo liberal) argument went, the left should concentrate on small-scale projects, moral concerns and the protection of vulnerable identities. Multiculturalism could replace radical change, membership of Amnesty that of political organisation’ (Costas Douzinas, The Guardian, 1 January 2010)

On 11 June 2004 the government of the Republic of Ireland put forward a referendum to amend article 9 of the Constitution to remove birth-right citizenship from children born in Ireland to an Irish citizen (or entitled to Irish citizenship). Birth right citizenship prevailed since the establishment of the Republic in 1922. The amendment did not include the children of the 1.8 million holders of Irish passports not born in Ireland who have one Irish grandparent and therefore entitled to Irish citizenship without having to set foot in Ireland. 79.8 per cent of the electorate voted in favour.
My argument is that the nation-state, theorised by David Theo Goldberg (2002) as a ‘racial state’, remains the focus of any analysis of racism, viewed by Foucault as ‘inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States’. Foucault argues that ‘the modern State can scarcely function without becoming involved with racism at some point’ (Foucault 2003: 254).
I view racism as ‘a political system aiming to regulate bodies’, rather than as individual prejudice (although individual citizens voted in favour of the Citizenship Referendum). Without suggesting Ireland as an ideal type ‘racial state’, I employ social theory to argue that like other nation-states, Ireland has evolved from being a ‘racial state’ – in which ‘race’ and ‘nation’ are defined in terms of each other – evident, for instance, in the ethnically narrow framing of the Constitution (Lentin 1998) – to a racist state, where governmental ‘biopolitics’ racialising indigenous groups and regulating immigration and asylum form the discursive construction of Irishness and otherness..
Until the onset of the recession, racial terminology of categorisation and control on the one hand and discourses of ‘cultural diversity’ on the other underpinned the Irish state’s response to the arrival of growing numbers of immigrants since the 1990s, in the shape of ‘intercultural’ and ‘integration’ politics.
I begin by outlining the application of Goldberg’s racial state theory to Ireland. I then briefly discuss Foucault’s theorisation of the modern nation-state as a ‘state of population’, monitoring and controlling the nation’s biological life which becomes a problem of sovereign power (Agamben 1998). I further argue that the tendency to re-define the nation-state’s boundaries means controlling not only immigrants, but also existing minority collectives within. During Tiger capitalism, state actors used contradictory discourses, claiming that Ireland ‘was getting it right’ in avoiding (French) assimilationism and (British) multiculturalism on the one hand, and on the other, insisting that in order to integrate, migrants must do things ‘our way’.
However, since the recession, racism, immigration and integration discourses have disappeared and I conclude by challenging social movements to re-orient their activism to racism and immigration.

Racial state

Goldberg posits modern nation-states as ‘racial states’, which exclude in order to construct homogeneity – which he sees as ‘heterogeneity in denial’. The racial state is a state of power, asserting its control over those within the state and excluding others from outside the state. Through constitutions, border controls, the law, policy making, bureaucracy and governmental technologies such as census categorisations, invented histories and traditions, ceremonies and cultural imaginings, modern states, each in its own way, are defined by their power to exclude (and include) in racially ordered terms, to categorise hierarchically, and to set aside. In the modern state, race and nation are defined in terms of each other to produce a coherent picture of the population in the face of a divisive heterogeneity.
Goldberg makes a distinction between antiracism and antiracialism. While antiracism is concerned with the impact of racial ideologies and programmes on the lived conditions of its victims, antiracialism is only concerned with concepts, categories and labels that invoke race. A key innovation in Goldberg’s approach is to avoid starting with the usual line that racism has cleverly ‘evolved’ and adapted ‘chameleon like’ to be acceptable in the new environment of political correctness. Instead, he expresses disappointment in movements against racism themselves for abandoning their programme half way. Goldberg’s core argument is that, whereas each of these began as movements against broad social structures that produced the conditions for genocide, exploitation, and segregation, they all petered out, becoming movements concerned with mere semantics, echoing Gilroy’s call, in ‘Race ends here’, that ‘race’ should not be used analytically…
Goldberg proposes two traditions of thinking about racial states. The first, naturalism, fixes racially conceived ‘natives’ as premodern, naturally incapable of progress. The second, historicism, elevates Europeans over primitive or underdeveloped others as a victory of progress (Goldberg 2002, p. 43).
Naturalism Irish-style is exemplified by English colonialism, racialising the Irish as bestial, and incapable of progress (Ní Shuinéar 2002). Irish historicism creates its own ‘racial inferiors’ through, firstly, the ongoing racialisation of Irish Travellers, conceived as ‘Irish national’ though not always ‘white’ (McVeigh 1996); secondly, through governmental technologies of asylum and immigration controls, aiming to restore modernity’s order just as all certainties – economic, civil, cultural, sexual – seem to be collapsing; and thirdly, through biopolitical governmental technologies regulating the lives of migrants, but also equality mechanisms, which reproduce racialised populations as ultimately unequal.
The advent of the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic boom transformed the situation where emigration outstripped in-migration. While many immigrants were returning Irish citizens, Irishness became racialised in new ways.   To borrow from Ignatiev’s book How the Irish Became White (1995), for the first time the Irish in Ireland became ‘white’, and Irishness became equated with whiteness precisely when it became increasingly difficult to make this equation. Historicism is one way of theorising this transition as it became clear that interpreting immigration and the presence of people of colour as ‘new’ underpins the elevation of Europeans and the respective racialisation of non-Europeans as working towards progress and equality with the Eurocentre.

Biopolitics: From racial state to racist state

Michel Foucault (2003) argues that when natural life becomes included in mechanisms of state power, politics turns into biopolitics, the territorial state becomes a ‘state of population’, and the nation’s biological life becomes a problem of sovereign power. Through a series of technologies, bio-power creates ‘docile bodies’, and the population – its welfare, wealth, longevity and health – becomes a subject, but also an object in the hands of government.
Biopower is addressed to living beings and directed at all the processes that refer to the mass of humans: birth, death, sickness, health, education, welfare, but also the gathering of information through demography and statistics.
Foucault differentiates between the sovereign power of the old territorial state (‘to make die and let live’) and modern biopower (‘to make live and let die’). The modern state can scarcely function without racism, ‘the break between what must live and what must die’ (Foucault 2003: 254). Race no longer serves one group against another, but becomes a ‘tool’ of social conservatism; a racism that society practices against itself, a tool of constant purification and social normalisation.
Biopower’s racialising technologies in the Republic of Ireland, in doing all it can to maintain homogeneity by ‘managing’ ethnic diversity, mean that it is arguably not merely ‘racial’ in its formation and use of discourses and practices such as the law, but also ‘racist’ in terms of using biopower technologies to control, in particular though not exclusively, migrant and racialised populations.

Racial categorisation and citizenship rights
Irish historicism regards non-Irish others as inadequate candidates for citizenship, employing patently racist legislation to criminalise, regulate and control both immigrants and indigenous populations.

1. Redefining indigenous populations
Foucault uses the concept of ‘biopower’ to demonstrate how the ‘ethnicisation’ of racism shifts from intra-societal degeneration to the threat posed from the outside. Thus, before I deal with immigration, let me briefly discuss the position of Irish Travellers, at 23,700, Ireland’s largest and oldest racialised group, who have fought long and hard to claim a status of an ‘ethnic group’.
Initially grudgingly recognised as an ethnic group by the state, on October 15 2003 the Minister for Justice Equality and Law reform stated Travellers ‘do not constitute a distinct group’ which was why ‘discrimination against Travellers’ was inserted as a ‘separate ground’ into the equality laws. The 2002 Housing Bill criminalises Traveller camping on public and private property, despite the fact that commitments to provide adequate accommodation to Travellers made by the government in its 1995 Task Force on the Travelling Community (1995) went largely unfulfilled.
Contradictorily, while the racial state deprives Travellers of their chosen ‘ethnic’ status which would allow them to name their discrimination ‘racism’, it does so in the pretence of caring, based on a Foucauldian ‘biopolitics’, according to which the role of the state is to ‘manage’, and in this case, assimilate and settle the Travellers, but ultimately aiming to segregate them. McVeigh argues that ethnicity denial smacks of genocidal discourses, citing the extermination of Roma and Sinti people by the Nazis. Not surprisingly, the Traveller advocacy centre Pavee Point was one of the CDPs whose funding was terminated in the recent cuts.

2. Immigration and asylum controls
Despite an explicit admittance that in order to maintain economic growth, Celtic capitalism needed immigrant labour, the state is doing all it can to restrict immigration. Loyal (2003) argues that the hegemonic construction of Ireland as an ‘open, cosmopolitan, multicultural, tourist friendly society’ obscures a ‘harsh reality of capitalist production, exclusionary nationalism and growing xenophobia in relation to both the state and the general populace’. The economic boom, instead of allaying racist fears, has ‘consistently treated non-national immigration as a political problem’.
State discourses demonstrate the demonisation of asylum seekers as ‘bogus refugees’, ‘economic migrants’, ‘illegal immigrants’ or simply ‘failed asylum seekers’, linking them to criminality and breaches of state security. Asylum seekers are presented as ‘costing too much’ and as competing with disadvantaged populations for scarce resources, and, crucially, the need to control them is presented as essential to the ‘common good’ and subordinated to ‘the integrity of the asylum process’.
Eithne Luibhéid (2004), contextualising the arrival of asylum seekers to Ireland in global restructuring, global capital accumulation, and global wars, argues that racial states need asylum seekers in order to ‘redraw racial and national boundaries that have become destabilised in the contemporary era’.
Although the number of asylum applications has gone down to 2,530 in 2009, by the end of November there were still 6,583 unprocessed asylum seekers in direct provision holding camps, prevented from working or take up educational courses, and forced to live on a paltry ‘comfort allowance’ of €19.60 per adult per week, not raised since it was first introduced in 2001. In 2009 only 90 applicants were granted refugee status
According to Ivana Bacik (2004), in response to legal challenges of the Immigration Act the Supreme Court ruled against the argument on discrimination. Thus the law differentiates  not only between citizens and ‘non nationals’, but also between categories of ‘non nationals’, upholding the legitimacy of public policy which ‘facilitates the better administration of the asylum system’.

3. The ‘Irish born children’ debate
Just as Travellers were no longer recognised as an ‘ethnic group’, so too children born in Ireland to non-citizen parents were assigned a new category, ‘Irish born children’, racially differentiated from children born in Ireland to citizen parents.
The right to automatic citizenship was consolidated by the amended Article 2 of the Constitution, as part of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which still assigned all those born in Ireland as part of ‘the nation’. The amendment meant, as was ruled in the 1989 Fajujonu Supreme Court case, that migrant parents of children born in Ireland had a claim to remain in Ireland to provide ‘care and company’ to their citizen child. This permission to remain was overturned in January 2003 when the Supreme Court ruled in the Lobe and Osayande appeal, that ‘non-national’ parents no longer had a strong case to be allowed to remain in Ireland to bring up their child. The Supreme Court privileged the State’s right to deport, and the ‘integrity of the asylum process’ over citizen children’s rights (CADIC 2003).
The ruling exposed the contradiction between two constitutional entities, ‘the nation’ and ‘the family’, termed in Article 41.1.1 as ‘the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society’. While still part of ‘the nation’, children born in Ireland to migrant parents lost their citizenship entitlement – another contradiction.
The court’s ruling in the L & O case illustrates the centrality of the law as a governmental technology deployed by the racial state. Upholding ‘control in the face of the anarchic, of order in the face of disorder’ (Goldberg 2002), Chief Justice Ronan Keane ruled that the State ‘was entitled to take the view that the orderly system of dealing with immigration and asylum applications should not be undermined by persons seeking to take advantage’ of the system. The contradiction between the ‘common good’ and the exclusion of those termed by the state as being outside the remit of full Irish citizenship illustrates Foucault’s insistence that racism is a defence mechanism exercised by society against itself.
In the wake of the February 2003 ruling, the Minister of Justice removed the process whereby an immigrant parent could apply for permission to remain in Ireland solely on the grounds of being the parent of a child citizen (CADIC, 2003). The abolition of the process resulted in 11,500 migrant parents of Irish citizen children becoming candidates for deportation as of July 2003.
For almost two years, the Minister for Justice refused to allow the right to remain to migrant parents of Irish children who had lawfully applied for residency. Among the 341 people deported between 2002 and February 2005 there were at least 20 citizen children (Dáil Question, 16 February 2005).
However, rhetoric aside, and due to the mobilisation by CADIC – a coalition of migrant and migrant support and human rights organisations initiated by AkiDwA (I was the co-founder and chair), a few months after the state won the Citizenship Referendum, the decision was reversed. In January 2005 the DJELR announced new arrangements for parents of Irish children born before 1 January 2005 to apply for residency in Ireland. By July 2005 16.693 applications were granted temporary leave to remain, with no rights to family reunification.

4. The citizenship referendum
Despite the state’s main message that Ireland’s citizenship laws, unique in the EU, were being exploited, Colin Harvey (2003) links state sovereignty to the insistence by states on determining who is entitled to enter their territory and become a citizen, and argues that immigration (and refugee) law, with its focus on the award of a status, leaves too much to the (racial) state to decide. The purpose is always to ‘secure national level protection’, which puts paid to the argument about the need to harmonise Ireland’s so-called generosity with citizenship standards of other EU member states.
However, the Minister for Justice was keen to emphasise that the proposed change was antiracist, not racist, and that ‘the greatest contribution to racism and xenophobia would be if it was perceived that the Government could not control immigration’. (see antiracist poster of that time)
Throughout the referendum debates, migrant mothers were positioned as deliberately having babies in Ireland to gain Irish citizenship for their children and residency rights for themselves and their spouses. Maternity hospitals were seen as swarmed by migrant mothers, but given that the Minister admitted that the maternity hospitals argument was a side issue, Dervla King (2004) showed there were no statistics to support the state’s claim about large numbers of non-EU nationals coming to Ireland solely to give birth. The total figure of births to non-EU nationals in the three Dublin maternity hospitals who did not book or were late arrivals in 2003 was 548 (under 2.4 per cent of the total number of births at these hospitals).
Positing ‘crisis racism’, Balibar argues that ‘immigration’ had become the new name of race, but one linked to historical appellations that enables individuals to be classified in a racist typology. Should we therefore keep quiet about racism, as suggested by Ireland’s Justice Minister, who consistently claimed that ‘Ireland is not a racist country’, or should we ‘suppress the cause of racism, lest we prove unable to control its effects, for which, read: send home the “foreign bodies” whose presence gives rise to “reactions of rejection”’, while being prepared to ‘assimilate all those who are assimilable by their nature or their aspirations’ (Balibar 1991).

Interculturalism or ingtegrationism? The contradictions

Thus far I have argued that, in regulating, managing and controlling both immigration and indigenous minorities so as to maintain homogeneity, Ireland moves from racial state to racist state.  Goldberg reminds us that in the move from antiracism to antiracialism, race and racism are disavowed and omitted from state vocabulary (see, for example, the decision, already in January 2009, to axe the government’s own advisory body the NCCRI); and that the racial state appropriates difference through celebrations of the multicultural, seeped, as I now demonstrate, in contradictory racial narratives of heterogenity.
Irish integration policies derive from economic needs but also from a ‘willingness to lean from other countries’ mistakes’ (MacCormaic, 2008), substituting ‘interculturalism’ and ‘integration’ for the narrative of the crisis of both assimilationism and multiculturalism.
Integration was articulated by the minister specifically appointed to the task as a ‘two way street involving rights and duties’, aimed, at ‘those migrants who reside, work and in particular those who aspire to be Irish citizens’ (Lenihan, 2008: 10). Naturally, such smooth talk makes no reference to changes in citizenship laws in the wake of the 2004 Citizenship Referendum. (cartoon)
In 2007 An Garda Siochána, having appealed for recruits from Ireland’s ‘new communities’, refused to allow a Sikh volunteer to the Garda reserve force to wear his turban on duty. The Garda insisted that the turban ban was not based on race or religion, but rather on providing an ‘impartial police service’ requiring, among other things, ‘our standard uniform and dress’ (O’Brien, 2007). At the same time it declined to rule out the wearing of Catholic religious symbols such as crucifixes, ashes and pioneer pins.
In a November 2009 the Garda conference, the ban was reiterated in the name of diversity, which, a speak said,  had taken an intercultural model, where diversity was ‘respected and reflected in the force’, which rejects ‘the assimilation model where newcomers would have to accept the majority status quo’. Dr Jasbir Singh of the Irish Sikh community said the ban affects not merely naturalised Sikhs but also their Irish-born children (Kelly, 2009).
The turban ban, an important turning point, demonstrates ministers’ confusion as, in support of the Garda stance, they both claimed the need for migrants to ‘assimilate into our own culture and own norms in society’ and warned that Ireland needs ‘to learn from the mistakes of others in relation to the whole issue of integration.
When culture is both object and instrument of governmentalities, and when racism is denied as forming an integral part of state control over incoming migrants and existing minorities seen as ‘culturally’ rather than ‘racially’ different, then diversity and integration become ‘integrationism’, the currency of the race relations industry. In After Optimism? McVeigh and I document the transition from ‘combating racism’ to ‘accommodating cultural diversity’, arguing that with the refusal to name and address state racism, ideologies of interculturalism and integration actually become racist, functioning to protect the operation of state racism (Lentin and McVeigh, 2006: 178).

Conclusion: Where to antiracism in Ireland?

‘The left is the main hope against an endgame of xenophobic, securitised, apocalyptic barbarism…What the decade taught me was to expect radical change and to try to imagine a renewed socialism in which freedom cannot flourish without equality and equality does not exist without freedom. The new decade’s resolution: one should become more radical as one grows older alongside the 21st century’ (Costas Douzinas, 1 January 2010).

The recession makes a huge difference to Irish people’s perceptions of immigration – Martina Byrne’s research shows that the professional class is no longer concerned with immigration, integration, interculturalism. The Christmas Eve triumphalist statement that ‘migrants are going home’ sounds like wishful thinking. According to the CSO, ‘only 57,112 of the 117,983 foreign nationals who received PPSNs in 2004 were still either working or claiming welfare in 2008. It is not known what happened to the rest but it is very likely that they left the Republic’ (Smyth, 2009).
Meanwhile, deportations and return flights continue apace. According to INIS (Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service) – taking into account deportations, voluntary returns, Dublin II returns and removal of EU citizens (mostly Roma, though they don’t say so) – in 2007 a total of 781 persons were either removed or assisted to return, and a total of 834 in 2006.
Celebrations of ‘diversity’, ‘interculturalism’ and ‘integration’ are fast giving way to wet dreams about a not too distant future of an Ireland, green again, white again. Meanwhile, migrants are having different dreams. This is demonstrated in my research on migrant networks, doubly grounded in the opportunities and constraints of the specific ethnoracial locality of post-Referendum Ireland on the one hand, and in the heterogeneous, often contradictory, networking practices engaged in by migrants on the other. The practices of migrant organisations can be theorised as ‘integration from below’, both strategically appropriating state discourses – so as to secure funds and a place at the table – and resisting these very discourses, which ultimately negate power inequalities, deny migrants crucial funding and a meaningful independent voice, and appropriate migrants’ intercultural practices so as to bolster the state’s own image of alternative modes of integration.
Despite the success of migrant-led organisations, the question of who speaks for who remains unanswered. This is where I see the challenge to social movements. It is crucial to make race and racism part of the debate and resist the neoliberal speak about migrants filling, or not, labour shortages. Basing antiracism on the lived experiences of the racialised, as demanded by Fanon, is central. However, it is wrong to elicit these experiences for analyses made by settled, white, Christian Irish people without relinquishing the stage to the racialised (as was done at a recent Equality Authority ‘expert forum’ on racism and racial stereotyping). CADIC was a successful coalition, but not because it was initiated by African women concerned about deportations, whose role, erased from the organisation’s history and public relations machine, needs to be acknowledged and reclaimed.
True antiracism is always anti state racism – all your integration policies and intercultural practices avoid the issue. In organising against racism, it is useful to consider what Kensika Monshengwo, formerly of the NCCRI, said to us in relation to the early days of migrant-led activism in 1990s Ireland and to the cooptation of migrants into state and NGO work:
‘There was antiracism campaign… there was a group… they even went to occupy Bertie Ahern’s office at one stage… but now, ok they have an organisation now… right… people are paid… people are managers from different ethnic minorities… but this is not a movement…’

In recent days the media reported somewhat triumphantly that ‘foreign nationals’ were going home. Using PPS statistics, a downward trend was reported across the workforce. According to December 2009 CSO figures, ‘57,112 of the 117,983 foreign nationals who received PPSNs in 2004 were still either working or claiming welfare in 2008’. In the absence of statistics for those who actually left Ireland, it was less clear ‘what happened to the rest, but it is very likely that they left the Republic’.

Last week further reports suggested the halving of ‘foreign nationals’ registering for work or social services. This trend was most apparent among migrants from the 12 new EU members; the number of Polish migrants registering for work went down from 42,500 in 2008 to 13,700 in 2009.

Migration statistics, in other words, are still limited to labour migrants, and depend very much on work permits and PPS numbers; however, according to the Immigrant Council of Ireland, such statistics are misleading. Not all labour migrants need to renew their permits annually, and people originally living here on the basis of work permits now have long term residency rights or citizenship, yet they are still migrants, whose needs – social, cultural, political – go beyond labour statistics.

Polish people living in Ireland deny the impression that all Poles are going home; indeed many prefer to stay here, and others continue to come even now, because surprisingly, they regard life here as gentler, less pressured. Furthermore, according to Piaras Mac Éinri, UCC lecturer in migration studies, many migrants from destinations such as Romania, though not entitled to work in Ireland, work semi illegally, doing jobs that even other East European migrants won’t do, and are often horribly exploited.

And these statistics do not include asylum seekers, many still living in holding camps, not allowed to work and often suffering from serious mental health problems as a result; nor do they include other non EU migrants with citizenship or leave to remain, many of whom live in appalling accommodation, isolated and desperate to make some sense of their life here, safer as it may be than what they had fled from.

Although for these migrants there are no integration or intercultural measures, now so hopelessly last year, many migrants are not waiting for state initiatives, and are busy enacting their own ‘integration from below’ social, cultural, advocacy and service provision networks and organisations. However, with spending cuts and increasing indifference to any contribution they can make, they face a serious danger of disenchantment, which we need to carefully watch out for.

Madam

Fintan O’Toole’s (spot-on as ever) article on the ironies of the Bishops’ multiculturalism (December 22, 2009, http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/1222/1224261109443.html) has broader ironic implications.

One irony relates to the church’s role in migrant integration. Having lost their key role in education and health service provision, Catholic religious orders have been working with migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. While extremely useful, many of the projects initiated by relilgious orders are run by white, Christian, settled Irish people, without giving leadership roles to migrants and other racialised people. This top down, and at time destructive approach means that migrants have little say in how these organisations are
funded and run.

The other, even broader, ironic implication relates to Irish integration policies. On the one hand, the Republic of Ireland claims to have ‘got it right’ in avoiding the pitfalls of both French assimilationism and British
multiculturalism through what it terms ‘interculturalism’ and ‘integration’. However, integration policies, which since the recession have been  conspicuous in their absebce, are targeted only at ‘legal’ migrants with refugee status or work visas, leaving other migrants, including asylum seekers, here ‘legally’ to seek refuge, out of the loop.

On the other hand, the state insists on integration ‘on our own terms’. Thus it demands proficiency in English, the state’s second language (while at the same time cutting the number of language support teachers), as a pre-condition to acquiring citizenship. And thus  An Garda Siochana refuses to allow Sikh volunteers to don a turban on duty, while not outlawing Catholic symbols, all in the name, the Garda insists, of ‘impartiality’ and ‘cultural diversity’. All of which makes a joke of the mantra of integration as a ‘two way process’, and is a far cry from the republican values of civic equality upheld by O’Toole.

Yours etc,

Ronit Lentin

Dear John and Chris

As your constituent, let me express my revulsion at the budget which has targeted the poorest and weakest in society.

As a public sector worker, I accept that high earners should bear the brunt, but introducing an extra income tax band for those earning over €100,000 (a category, which,  by the way, includes me) would have brought €2bn in revenue without cutting disability and unemployment allowances, children’s allowances and taxing low paid workers.

John, in particular - I voted for you to get Michael McDowell out and belived in your green policies - you and I spoke on several antiracism platforms and I had a lot of respect for you then. I feel you and the Greens have sold out to FF
and to power and have not really achieved much progress in either social issues or green issues. And now, with this budget, you have demonstrated your downright disregard for poor people, people with disabilities, carers, parents of young children, unemployed people and low earners.

You will not get my vote in any subsequent elections (and, needless tosay, neither will Fianna Fail, ever).

Best

Ronit

Yes, he did reduce public sector workers progressively – some high earners will lose more money, but lower earners will lose more proportionately.

I am not an economist and will not do a detailed analysis of the cuts. But I do want to reflect on the rhetoric of ‘we are all in it together’ and ‘we all must sacrifice’ for the ‘common good’. As Fintan O’Toole showed clearly in his recent book A Ship of Fools, the deep recession Ireland finds itself in, is due to both stupidity and corruption. As the rich became richer – aided by their friends in government – the less well off were somewhat better off during the boom, but also incurred greater debts, being forced to buy over inflated houses and pay over inflated mortgages.
What interests me here, once again, is the complete silence on the position of migrants in the debates about the budget cuts. While the community development sector rightly fought against their foreclosure and against the forced amalgamation with area partnership, the consequences for migrants and migrant-led organisations has not yet been spoken about.

So let’s reiterate. There still are some 6,000 asylum seekers in holding centres, living in limbo and awaiting decision on their residency status. In receipt of bed and board and a paltry allowance, not raised since 2001, asylum seekers are often desperate, often having to resort to a variety of strategies to make ends meet, including, in extreme cases, selling sex to put food on the table. Secondly, a large number of migrants who came here as labour migrants – to fill labour shortages in the construction, hospitality, agricultural and care sectors – now find themselves unemployed, and in many cases undocumented. Organisations catering for homeless people report growing percentages of migrants among their clients. Yet nobody speaks a bout them. Indeed, research has shown that people who formerly were reasonably supportive of migrants, particularly ‘useful’ labour migrants, are now saying they have other problems – migration is no longer on the radar.

Anecdotally, racism is on the increase. From vile online anti-Roma and anti-migrant postings, to the recent finding by the EU Fundamental Rights Agency, that Ireland is among the top ten in discrimination against ethnic minorities. 54% of Sub Saharan Africans in Ireland report racial discrimination. Yet no one speaks about it.

Cuts in education, in health, in housing, in training and cuts in allowances such as children’s allowances are all bound to affect migrants, yet no one speaks about it.

Ronit Lentin
Department of Sociology
TCD

Madam,

The shortsightedness of the government’s plans to subsume community development projects in area partnerships (Letters, 25 November) was eloquently articulated by four community activists on Vincent Browne’s TV3 show on the same day. Cathleen O’Neill of Kilbarrack CDP, Rita Fagan of St Michael’s Family Resource Centre, Bronagh O’Neill of the Canal Equality Campaign and Margaret O’Shea of the Kerry Network for People with Disabilities highlighted the services CDPs provide, often by volunteers, to their communities, and the loss to theses communities of taking the projects away from the people they are serving. The transfer to area partnerships has been decided upon without consultation and it is evident that now more than ever CDPs are both ‘good value’ and essential in providing services such as childcare, after school care, programmes for women and disabled people, not provided by the state and local authorities.

Likewise, migrant-led organisations and networks, whose case has not yet been championed, are also facing drastic funding cuts. Like the CDPs, they also provide much needed services to their constituencies, often on a voluntary basis. These services, including empowerment and advocacy, language training, gender-based programmes, and basic advice on rights and entitlements, are not provided by the state or local authorities. Thus, like the CDPs, migrant-led organisations save the state money while at the same time facilitating the smoother integration of migrants into Irish society and preventing the eruption of banlieu-style disturbances in the future.

The planned cuts and amalgamations are supported by leading philanthropists, whose financial largesse involves the over zealous management of CDPs and migrant organisations, often leading to the decimation of the very sector they purport to support. I call on Minister Eamon O Cuiv and Minister of State John Curran to guarantee the continued funding and autonomy of both CDPs and migrant-led organisations whose contribution is vitally needed now more than ever before.

Yours etc

Ronit Lentin

It was an opportunity missed. Rather than occasion a much needed debate on the secularisation of the Irish public sphere, the turban ban drew supporters and opponents for an ‘Irish’ way of doing culture. Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole, arguing that Garda and state practice is replete with Catholic symbolism and practices, proposed that state institutions either adopt a ‘no religious symbols in public’ ruling across the board, including Catholic religious symbols – his preferred option – or allow all religious symbols, including turbans and veils. In an interesting twist, Harpreet Singh, president of the Irish Sikh Council, linking immigration and Irish emigration, pointed to the large number of Irish migrants in the US who have converted to Sikhism and asked whether they would face the same barriers if they return home.

This was in 2007, towards the end of Ireland’s Celtic capitalism era. In 2009, as Ireland is sunk in the depth of a gloomy recession, the turban issue raises its head again. But wait for it, this time is it explicitly reiterated in the name of none but ‘diversity’. As the Garda’s ‘diversity champion’ chief administrative officer John Leamy said in a Garda conference on diversity on 19 November, the force’s diversity strategy ‘has taken an intercultural model, where diversity was respected and reflected in the force’ rather than an ‘assimilation model where newcomers would have to accept the majority status quo’. And yet again, the Garda claims the ban is about ‘impartial policing’ – as if a turbaned or veiled Garda officer cannot possibly be impartial, as opposed to a Catholic, cross-bearing officer of course.
But hold on a second. If diversity is ‘respected and reflected in the force’ and newcomers ‘do not have to accept the majority status quo’, how come the Garda is still insisting on assimilation, as Dr Jasbir Singh argued, effectively denying ‘equal employment rights’ to Sikhs and other minorities? The ban affects not only naturalised Sikhs migrants, but also their Irish born Sikh children. Dr Singh reminded the conference that in Britain and other countries turbaned Sikhs serve in the police.

Remember however, that the performance of cultural diversity becomes a device, a brand, as state bodies, companies, and educational institutions pride themselves on their ‘happy colourful faces’, albeit without relinquishing control of those diversity projects to the owners of these very faces. The reiterated turban ban denotes the confusion, by the Gardai and other state bodies, about the meaning of ‘interculturalism’, an Irish (policy) solution to an Irish (immigration) problem, both multiculturalism and assimilation under a different name. It is absurd to both claim diversity and interculturalism and demand ‘newcomers’ do things ‘our’ own way without taking any steps towards officially secularising Ireland’s (Catholic) public sphere.

To put migrants back into the recession debate, let’s get some facts straight.

Firstly, workers were the great majority of the various categories of non-EU nationals coming to Ireland in the last decade (about 280,000 work permits were issued from 1998 to 2008), followed by asylum seekers (74,000 applications made from1998 to 2008), students and dependents. Between 2002 and 2006, there were 133,436 people with EU nationalities in Ireland, of whom 103,476 came from the UK, and, after 2004, 120,534 came from the 10 accession EU states.

Secondly, migrant workers make up a high proportion of people signing on the live register. According to the Trinity Immigration Initiative, between October 2007 and 2008, this number increased by over 100% from 21,035 to 44,600 (while the number of Irish nationals signing on increased by 52%). Most recently, the number of migrants from the New Member States signing on, who had the highest employment rate for any migrant group, increased by 200% from 6,542 to 22,285
In addition, in recent months the Homeless Agency noticed a trend of the increasing use of homeless services by non-Irish nationals, usually from the EU Accession states, who are affected by the Habitual Residency Condition, and therefore have worked and contributed PRSI payments for a period of at least two years, and are thus eligible for welfare payments.
What do all these facts and figures tell us? Firstly, if we follow the mayor’s call, we need to begin by deporting British people. But just imagine the outcry if Britain called for the deportation of Irish people who cannot afford to pay for themselves back to Ireland.
Secondly, we need to remember not only the contribution made by migrant workers to the Irish Tiger economy. We need to also remember that they are not just workers, but humans who qualify for the same rights and duties as Irish citizens.

Thirdly, and lest we forget, Ireland is also home to 6,841 asylum seekers whose cases are still pending and who are still living in direct provision holding centres, existing on an allowance of 19.10 euro per week (not raised since it was first introduced in 2001). They are surely the poorest of the poor, whose concerns, and the concerns of the unquantifiable number of undocumented migrants, many of whom became undocumented not by choice, are never raised in the recent discussions.

Irish people should remember that migrants are humans, part of Irish society. Moreover, migrants have children, many of whom were born in Ireland and knowing no other reality. For the sake of these children, if not for their parents, we need to make migrants part of all debates on the current economic crisis.

Shortly after the UN Commission on Human Rights adopted the Goldstone Report the Israeli Ambassadress to the United Nations started a whining, emotional blackmailing attack against the commission: “Israel is the only state in the world which is being discriminated against by the commission and criticized more than any other state in the world!” she complained.

Her Excellency the Ambassadress should be reminded of what really makes Israel so unique globally.

    Israel is the only state in the world that apparently was established based on a United Nations resolution but whereas the said resolution was about the establishment of two states, a Jewish one and a Palestinian one, the resolution was immediately breached by Israel which took over most of the territory designated for the Arab state.
    Israel is the only state in the world which was established during the 20th century on the ruins of another people, which expelled two thirds of an indigenous population out of the territory it had concurred turning them into refugees and refusing to allow their return in direct contradiction to a UN resolution on this matter.
    Israel is the only state in the world that defined the remains of the indigenous population over whose territory she had settled as “foreigners” and subjected them to its peculiar immigration laws as if they had just landed in the state from far and beyond.
    Israel is the only state in the world that had managed to annul a fully justified UN resolution that defined Zionism as racism.
    Israel is the only state in the world that invented a nation which can only be joined through a religious conversion.
    Israel is today the only state in the world sustaining an Apartheid regime which discriminates against its own non-Jewish citizens through a complete set of laws and legislations, including property rules, nationality laws and security regulations.
    Israel is in fact the only apparition in the developed world of an army which owns a state, an army whose commanders blatantly interfere to interrupt every move to end the conflict that might jeopardize the smooth run of their gravy train.
    Israel is the only state in the world that instead of adhering to human code of conduct during its self initiated wars tries to convince the world that it deserves a special, different and more convenient set of war rules, rules that will not define the killing non-Jews as crime.
And so while the Israeli ambassadress to the United Nations tries to present herself and her masters as the Little Dutch Boy from the fairy tales who tries to stop the flood by sticking his little finger to the hole in the dam, indeed the only fill Israel can offer the world as a solution to unsolved issues is a dynamite stick.

Eli Aminov is a peace activist living and Jerusalem and a member of the committee for secular and democratic state.

http://www.onesdstate.blogspot.com/