The news that just 243 people applied for the eased work visa programme in its first two months was seen as disappointing by IBEC. Indeed it was. More than half that number was accounted for by a group of Filipina nurses.
The new rules allow nurses, IT and construction professionals from countries outside the European Economic Area - the 15 states in the EU, plus European Free Trade Association states Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein - to apply for a work visa from the nearest Irish embassy or consulate. A job offer from a valid Irish employer is the key requirement.
The other system - which still applies to all work categories other than those three - entails an employer finding the worker abroad, applying for a work permit, getting it and informing the job candidate, who must then apply for a visa.
Once they have a visa, immigrants under both systems have to present themselves at an immigration point, where an immigration officer still has discretion to refuse entry.
The new system applies to nurses, but not to doctors; to software programmers, but not to fund managers; to quantity surveyors, but not to brickies and labourers. Chefs, waiters and kitchen porters need the "old" work permit, driving restaurant managers mad and forcing some to raise prices or close businesses, faced with rising labour costs. The alternative is to ignore the work status of employees altogether. Seasonal farm workers remain under the old system too, much to the annoyance of horticultural and fruit farmers.
Quite a few readers e-mailed in response to a recent piece on changing immigration policy to facilitate, rather than prevent, people coming in. There is clearly significant frustration among work permit holders with the old, yet extant, system affecting 8,709 people in all (excluding the 243 who came in under the new rules).
No work-permit holder who was here already benefited from the new, more liberal rules. The new work permit rules apply only to new applicants for work visas. One cannot apply for the visas from inside the State.
Present holders of work permits have seen very little liberalisation in rules on work permits, immigration and residence procedures. Those are three different areas of the same problem and each must be addressed if the stated policy to facilitate economically-related immigration is to have effect.
The most vehement views came from Irish people who had returned from abroad and had encountered what appeared to them irrational, bureaucratic and inexplicable rules for immigration, residence and work permits applying to their non-Irish, non-European Economic Area friends and prospective spouses.
One correspondent said that, probably prior to my adult memory, the Meteorological Service had always employed a range of foreign nationals and had not encountered obstacles in getting work permits for them. A fair point, but perhaps the public service was looked on relatively benignly by the then administrators of the work permit and immigration procedures.
IBEC says one of the main reasons for the low take-up of the new visas is lack of information among employers here and prospective employees abroad.
Who's job is it to fix that? The State agency, FAS, principally, has been given the task of getting the message out. I wonder whether any State agency should be given this job.
Where the business motivation is strong and the cost-benefit ratio favourable, businesses tend to do things for themselves. Businesses who had strong sales propositions did not, and do not, wait for Enterprise Ireland or its forerunners to make their sales for them. Where employees are badly needed, businesses that are copped on usually don't wait for the State to organise recruitment fairs.
You'd expect those with the greatest interest in hiring foreign workers to put in a good deal of effort to do whatever was necessary to find them, including sending out the message that the work permit rules are easier.
On the broader policy, IBEC is perfectly right to seek an extension of the new work visas to many more job functions.
At this stage, the onus is on those who would argue for retaining strong controls designed earlier to safeguard whatever employment there was and aimed also at keeping out undesirable security risks to demonstrate why a liberal, open system cannot work better. The economy needs it. Our society benefits. Many of the controls - such as signing on at police stations annually by residence permit holders - cannot possibly be effective for any purpose, including as security measures, and are nothing more than a wasteful, bureaucratic annoyance.
If we were to design an immigration system from scratch for Ireland at the start of the 21st century, in the EU, it would not be anything like what we have now. That task remains for the wise people on the interdepartmental group on employment immigration, and for their political masters. They will respond to pressure from employers and employees alike.
Oliver O'Connor is contributing editor at Finance and Finance Dublin.
e-mail: ooconnor@indigo.ie
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