Understanding Migration. Exploring Our Responsibility

Diocese of Kerry, JPIC, Tralee, 28 October 2015

Describing the boat leaving Dun Laoghaire, the late, renowned John B Keane wrote

Underneath it all was the heart-breaking frightful anguish of separation. It would be a waste of time for me to launch into a description of what went on. A person has to be part of it to feel it.[1]

We Irish are no strangers to that experience of loss, whether personally or at one remove. Often it is the poets, writers and artists who best express it. Let one of those, the writer Eugene McCabe, speak -

It was Sunday when Paddy (20) phoned and asked:

‘What’s it like at home now – the weather?’

‘Raining’, I said

‘Raining here too in Manhattan.’

And we talked on. Near the end of the call, he said

‘I’ve been looking down the street all morning thinking about Drumard, going round and round every field in my head, I can see them as clear as anything.’

After that image of grieving it was hard to keep talking.[2]

The sentiments of migrants, universally and through the centuries, surely bear out the words of Euripides, words recorded some 431 years before the Common Era–

There is no greater sorrow than the loss of your native land.

It is no surprise that the Palestinian academic, the late Edward Said, spoke of exile as …strangely compelling to think about and terrible to experience.[3]

Loss of home and homeland, loss of family and friends, loss of the familiar, feelings of being in the unknown, loneliness …terrible to experience!

No wonder that ‘feeling at home’, even if we do not always advert to it, is something we treasure dearly. This is what we so often wish others when we want to make them feel welcome.

The migrant journey

It is convenient to use the term ‘migrants’ for people who migrate, but they are, first and foremost, people. Like most people, the vast majority seek simply to settle down and live their lives. … ‘migrants’ are an astonishingly diverse group. … There is no prototypical ‘migrant’.[4]

And so there is no prototypical migrant journey. There are aspects which all migrant journeys have in common. And the migrant journey is multi-dimensional. We have glanced briefly at the emotional dimension, deepest and least visible while often the most painful. But every migrant also experiences a geographic journey and a bureaucratic journey.

Geographic journey

Perhaps the geographic is the most obvious aspect of the migrant journey – a setting out and a distance to be covered, mostly with borders to be crossed and controls to be faced when one reaches one’s intended or, as is often the case, unintended destination. Migrants easily find themselves in an unknown place.

In these last months we have learned a great deal about distances travelled and obstacles encountered along the way. In our livingrooms, we have seen the faces of people of all ages. Who can forget the images of parents, babies and tiny tots as they walk and walk and walk…? The ‘long walk’ has surely taken on new meaning. We have watched pictures of those rescued and have seen the harrowing images and heard the stories of those for whom rescue came too late.

We think … about the many who have lost their lives in the process. It is a profoundly

shaming human tragedy founded on global injustice that requires an urgent human rights based response. [5]

We know the added anguish of those left with no option but to have recourse to smugglers or, even much worse, to traffickers. At the same time, how can we take as credible the official commentary which so often denounces those opportunists as if they bear sole responsibility for the migrants’ fate? How often are migrants dependent on their assistance, not just with means of transport but also in dealing with the authorities who operate border controls.

United Nations Representative for International Migration, Peter Sutherland, speaking recently of the 3,000 or so people in the camps at Calais, had this to say

The compulsion to leave was obviously so powerful that the migrants were prepared to spend their last pennies and risk their lives in rickety boats to escape.[6]

Even for those migrants whose travel may be less hazardous or heart-wrenching, there is always the journey that leaves one endless physical miles or kilometres away from ‘home’, not to mention the psychological distance beyond calculation.

My father left (the suitcase) by the door.

In our kitchen someone was always leaving home.[7]

Bureaucratic Journey

Complex and inevitable - inevitably complex!

Here, we are taking for granted that we are not speaking of those migrants who, like most of us, have a valid passport, can easily get the requisite visa when necessary and can choose a reliable mode of transport, with freedom to decide on our destination and, most often, with arrangements made for when we arrive.

What we are calling ‘bureaucratic’ is the aspect of the journey that generally varies most. Here, everything depends on the particular category into which the migrant falls. In Ireland, as elsewhere, the label assigned is determinative -

Convention asylum seeker - (applicant for asylum under the 1952 Geneva Convention)

Programme Refugee - (asylum seeker accepted for re-settlement and recognised as a refugee before arrival in the country)

Asylum seeker under the Irish Refugee Protection Programme (September 2015)

Migrant - from an EEA country with the right to enter/ access work in Ireland

Migrant - from outside EEA but with a visa and, usually, a job already secured.

Asylum seekers under the Geneva Convention on Refugees

Ireland

Currently there are in the Republic of Ireland some 8,000 persons awaiting a decision on their asylum application of whom less than half (3,607) are resident in Direct Provision (DP) accommodation centres. Almost 1,500 persons have lived in those centres for over 5 years. About one-third are children. Of the more than 4,000 applicants not living in DP centres, there is no record of the numbers in other accommodation or of those who have left the State. [8]

Getting to know and gradually getting close to and building up trust with people in this Limbo-like situation, one gets insights into the pain, fear and dread with which they live, day and night -

I have listened to Blessing’s[9] recurring dream. Standing with her Mother (deceased) on the railway platform awaiting a train. The train comes but does not stop…

Many asylum seekers speak of similar dreams.

Looking at the migrant situation in Ireland, and specifically the asylum system, Professor Brendan Kelly[10] concludes -

Enforced dispersal impairs psychological wellbeing and undermines dignity; relocation should be arranged collaboratively with migrants and host communities. Enforced idleness is an unnatural circumstance that is uniquely corrosive of dignity and wellbeing; people need to be engaged in meaningful activity and allowed to work.

Globally

To get a true picture of the situation in Ireland and, indeed, in Europe, we need to put those figures in a global context -

At the end of 2014 the number of those forcibly displaced by persecution, conflict, generalised violence and human rights violations (refugees, internally displaced persons and asylum seekers) stood at almost 60m. These comprise some 20m refugees, over 38m internally displaced persons, and nearly 12m asylum seekers.[11]

The top host countries are Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, Ethiopia and Jordan. Developing regions host 86% of the world’s refugees. In Lebanon, for example, about 25% of the population of the country is made up of refugees. Only some 6% have sought asylum in Europe.[12]

Peter Sutherland notes that proximity does not create responsibility for migrants or refugees and gives the example of Lebanon and Turkey and asks why Greece or Italy should have disproportionate numbers just because they are on the Mediterranean.?

The Working Group on the Protection System, (popularly known as the Working Group on Direct Provision) set up by Justice Minister, Frances Fitzgerald, and which reported to Government in June last, recommended inter alia that asylum applicants waiting for five or more years for their case to be processed be given a positive decision within six months of the publication of the Report. Until now, few of the Report’s recommendations have been implemented nor is there any sign of a programme of implementation being put in place. When it comes to the migration question, the issue of the absence of political will is ever-present. Note also that the recent Budget did not include anything for asylum seekers.

While the plight of those in the asylum system for far too many years is of serious concern, so too is the situation of those currently arriving in the country to seek asylum. It is projected that this year (2015) some 3,100 people will come to seek refuge in the Irish Republic, the first annual increase in new applicants since 2002. For more than a decade, the Government has been proposing to put in place a single asylum application procedure. This is intended to replace the current multi-layered, sequential and cumbersome process where an asylum applicant may go through five consecutive stages before getting a decision. Inevitably, this results in individuals and families spending years and years in the asylum process and in the DP accommodation centres.

It is worth noting that the first draft document outlining a single procedure was published more than ten years ago, in 2005. The General Scheme of what is now called the International Protection Bill was published in May last. With no clear time-line, the waiting for a single procedure goes on.

Programme Refugees

In recent years, numbers coming annually to Ireland have been in two-digit figures with the country accepting some 300 people in the past five year.

The Irish Refugee Protection Programme

In response to the on-going arrival in Europe of large numbers of migrants, Minister Frances Fitzgerald, announced last month that under the so-called Irish Refugee Protection Programme, the Government has agreed to accept 4,000 refugees. However, this modest figure includes some 1,900 people who had been already been accepted under other programmes. According to the Minister, a network of Emergency Reception and Orientation Centres are to be set up in this country for initial acceptance and processing, and decisions on refugee status will be made in those Centres within weeks.[13] In the absence of an overall EU plan - not to mention a UN plan, since this is truly a global issue - and with Ireland having nothing more than a rough sketch of this new programme, one can only hope that the situation of new arrivals will not replicate that of the people who over the past twenty years or so have sought a place of refuge in this country.

As Pope Francis rightly points out in his Message for World Day of Migrants and Refugees 2016,

In the end… victims of violence and poverty, leaving their homelands, (on a ) journey towards the dream of a better future … frequently encounter a lack of clear and practical policies regulating the acceptance of migrants and providing for short or long term programmes of integration, respectful of the rights and duties of all.

Migrants

In general, migrants from other EU countries have the right to come to live and work in Ireland – in the same was as Irish nationals can live and work in other EU countries.

Briefly put, migrants from EEA countries, by complying a with a range of conditions, may come to work and live in Ireland. In general, however, there is no channel of legal entry through which people from outside the EEA can come freely to live and work in this country.

Migrants are our brothers and sisters in search of a better life, far away from poverty, hunger, exploitation and the unjust distribution of the planet’s resources which are meant to be equitably shared by all. Don’t we all want a better, more decent and prosperous life to share with our loved ones?[14]

Migration - Exploring our responsibility

We need to open our eyes, to see anew. All the evidence is pointing to the fact that migration is a permanent feature in the world today. For decades now, we have been living in a globalised world where goods, information and capital move swiftly and freely across borders, but where movement of people, women, men and children, are subjected to increasing restrictions

Looking today at migration in general and at the current humanitarian crisis, what are we seeing?

Migration is a structural reality in the world today

Migration is a global phenomenon

Migration is a permanent feature of life, not a passing phase

Migration touches the lives of all people

Migration challenges established systems and modes of thought

Migration raises new questions for our understanding of.human rights.

However we understand or describe it, we cannot ignore the clear evidence that we are living in a new era insofar as movement of people is concerned. The old rules no longer apply. Former systems are obsolete. Established protocols no longer hold. Clearly delineated categories are redundant.

As never before, we must now view migrants not only on the basis of their status as regular or irregular, but above all as people whose dignity is to be protected and who are capable of contributing to progress and the general welfare.[15]