A former United States congressman, Mr Bruce Morrison, who secured 48,000 work permits for Irish people living illegally in the United States in the 1980s, has condemned the Government's proposed citizenship referendum as "dangerous".
Describing the Republic's asylum and immigration system as "hopelessly inefficient", he said: "There is so much work to be done to bring together a coherent immigration policy in Ireland rather than jump into a referendum."
Voters, he said, were now being asked to tighten up citizenship laws even though the existing regulations, including speedy deportations of illegals, were not being properly enforced.
"To ask them to decide in a vacuum with inadequate enforcement of existing laws is to invite them to exercise their worst instincts about newcomers rather than their best. That is what I think is dangerous about the referendum," Mr Morrison said.
The warning from the former congressman, who has in the past been an influential friend of Ireland on Capitol Hill, will come as an embarrassment to the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr McDowell.
Many of the 48,000 who qualified for "Morrison visas" eventually secured United States citizenship, he told The Irish Times yesterday in a telephone interview from his Maryland office.
"Not an insignificant number have gone back to Ireland. They arrived in the early to mid-80s when the Irish economy was very poor, with high unemployment. Now Ireland is a great place," he said.
Immigrants were now attracted by that success, he said. "Ireland is a destination country. It needs to manage the challenges and to do it in an appropriate way that reflects appropriate values."
Under the Government's proposal, citizenship would not be granted to a child unless one of its parents had been legally resident on the island of Ireland for three of the four years prior to its birth.
"How is it to be defined precisely? Once you start doing that you create doubt. Perhaps a parent was entitled to work in Factory A, but not in Factory B. Will all of that be questioned? If the child gets into trouble will they now be deported? Once you try to define it you breed a kind of doubt that is unnecessary," said Mr Morrison, who speaks regularly on international immigration issues.
"The alternative to birthright citizenship is citizenship based upon ethnicity with a set of technical rules that leave open the possibility that people born and brought up in Ireland are not citizens."