Celtic Dragon faces a bleak future

New Government proposals to regulate the working hours of Ireland's foreign student population could lead to greater exploitation rather than eradicate it, especially for the many young Chinese here

AS HE TELLS IT, Junyu Wang was having a meal in a Chinese restaurant on Parnell Street in Dublin not too long ago when gardaí from the immigration bureau arrived and ordered staff and diners to stay put. "They said, 'everybody sit down, don't move, give us your ID'," he recalls. "If you're illegal, they arrest you." It's a conversation about Government plans for new student work permits that leads him to the story of the restaurant raid, but in Wang's eyes the two are filaments of the same thread. Slowly but unmistakably, he is saying, the screw is tightening on Ireland's Chinese students.

It's a year since Wang, concerned that there was no representative group for the students who make up the bulk of Dublin's Chinese community, founded the Overseas Chinese Organisation, a voluntary body that helps those who need advice on their rights or who run into trouble with employers or landlords. There's no shortage of visitors: in the past year the group has resolved some 200 employment cases, and nearly every file on Wang's desk tells of a compatriot who was unfairly dismissed or denied the minimum wage.

Under draft Government proposals sent to the social partners last month, all non-European Economic Area (EEA) students with a part-time job offer will soon be required to apply for a work permit, providing details of the position, the employer's identity, the salary and hours. It will be the biggest change in the student visa regime since 2000, when the Government decided to allow all non-EEA students to work part-time to help finance their studies. That scheme allows students to work 20 hours a week during the college year and 40 hours out of term.

The Chinese will be among the groups most affected, but while many see the idea as a useful way of reducing exploitation by giving the Government a record of where each student is working, and under what conditions, Wang worries that it could also have the opposite effect. "Tuition fees are very expensive and they have to work because they have to pay for rent and food," he says. "Twenty hours might not be enough to pay for tuition fees, rent and food and everything, so sometimes they work two or three part-time jobs."

Wang fears the regulation could lead many to take cash-in-hand work, "like a slave, where you're paid very little money", and believes it would be typical of the Government's approach to non-European students. "The Government doesn't care. They just want non-EU people to come here and pay tuition fees. Then when you graduate, they kick you out."

While Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong have settled in Ireland since the 1950s after being drawn by the potential of the catering trade across post-war Europe, China's progressive integration into the world's economy since the 1990s led to a shift in the profile of its émigrés. Remittances from old emigrants became less important and support for overseas study (mostly confined until the 1970s to a few exchange programmes with the Soviet Union) became a plank of China's national development strategy.

As a result, Chinese student numbers have risen rapidly across Europe, with hundreds of Western education agencies vying with one another to lure the sons and daughters of the boom abroad. Dublin Business School now has 22 agents recruiting prospective students in China, including nine in Beijing, five in Shanghai, two in Dalian and one in Chengdu. The result of such efforts is that in some Dublin language schools there are classrooms composed entirely of Chinese students. And though their numbers are smaller, the universities, which stand to gain three times more in fees from a Chinese student than they do from an Irish one, have followed suit.

According to the last census, there were just over 11,000 Chinese living in the Republic in April 2006, almost twice the number reported four years earlier and enough to make them the seventh largest immigrant group in the State. They are overwhelmingly young, single, educated and urban.

THE TITLE OF A recent academic paper on the ethnic Chinese in Ireland - Celtic Tiger, Hidden Dragon - makes reference to the popular perception that Ireland's Chinese live at a certain remove, that their integration into the economy has never been matched by their incorporation into society.

Integration, of course, is a nebulous, problematic term, but according to the findings of a recent large-scale study carried out by researchers at UCD for the Immigrant Council of Ireland, there might be something in the assumption. From their assessment of the integration of four migrant groups (Lithuanians, Chinese, Indians and Nigerians) some clear patterns arose. The Chinese had very low rates of participation in political activities and in trade unions. They also earned less than others, with 59 per cent saying their average annual income was below €14,400.

Of the four groups, they were more likely to regularly spend time with Irish people but not necessarily more likely to form a close bond with them. They had a strong desire for social interaction with Irish people, but the desire was thwarted by pressure on people's lives, the language barrier, limited spaces for social interaction, and the perceived difficulties of forming close friendships with the Irish.

This corroborated other studies showing that for Chinese student-workers, the Irish experience is bleaker than for many others, marked by constant anxiety about money, language and immigration status. After an official tightening of visa regulations in 2005, the numbers of undocumented Chinese have risen, and while research shows they are disproportionately affected by crime, they are among the least likely to report their experiences to the gardaí.

When I asked one Chinese migrant why that might be, she told me the Chinese symbol for government is composed of two mouths under a roof. "An ordinary person has one mouth, the government has two," she says. "Who wins? People don't want anything to do with government. The government is for imposing the law, not for helping us."

Money - or the lack of it - is the concern around which all others turn. Dr Lan Li of UCD says many young Chinese mainlanders come to Ireland with the intention of going to university but very quickly realise it's an impossible dream. She calculates that if a Chinese student worked full-time for a year, keeping living expenses to a minimum, all her savings would probably not support one year at an Irish university, where tuition fees for foreign students can amount to €15,000 a year.

When Ying Yun Wang, a PhD student at Trinity College, and Dr Rebecca Chiyoko-O'Riain of NUI Maynooth published a report on Chinese students two years ago, they quoted one 26-year-old language student who described the sort of unending routine familiar to many others. "I worked seven days a week for two years," the woman said. "During the week, I had to wake up at 5am and started work at 6am. From 6am to 7am, I cleaned the casino. Then I cleaned a big pub, which included a restaurant as well. I finished that work at noon. Then from 12.30pm to 2.30pm, I cleaned an office. After that I went home to have a break. Then from 4pm to 6pm I worked in an office. Usually I could finish before 6pm. From 6pm to 10pm, I studied in the language school." It's a common scenario, says Susan Yu, another student. "They sleep for a short time, they don't have any social life. They don't complain - they study for three years and it's not a good life for them, but they know that after they finish, it will be okay."

SINCE THE 1970S, it has been Communist Party policy to encourage the "overseas Chinese" to one day return home. And in Ireland too, official fostering of the migration route between the two countries has been founded on the assumption that China's student visitors will be just that. But for those who do stay, the challenge is to break out of the role into which some feel society has cast them ("I am always the worker who works for the Irish", as one man puts it). Even for those ethnic Chinese who were born here, there can be a disjunction between their perception of themselves and the way that mainstream society regards them. One young woman, born in Ireland to Chinese parents, classes herself as Irish but finds that here there is unease with notions of hybridity, with being "in between" - and she feels herself constricted by the essentialised ethnic identity ascribed to her by others. For some, the result is one of double alienation, first from one's own ethnic group and then from the society into which they anxiously seek entry.

Frank Heran Suo, a 25-year old student, likens the overseas Chinese to the Jews of the 19th century and says most harbour the hope of returning home one day. But Frank has been living here since he was 18 and after seven years he admits to having grown accustomed to the Irish way of life. "When I go back to China, I don't feel I belong," he says. "Back in China everything is so different. The culture's different. They don't see me as a stranger but I feel like a stranger in China."

Ruadhán Mac Cormaic will give the final lecture in this year's RTÉ Thomas Davis series on China-Ireland relations next week. Entitled China Comes to Ireland, it will be broadcast at 10.02pm on Monday on RTÉ Radio 1.