Facing the challenge of mass immigration

There was a sense of unreality in the air this week as Mary Harney announced that the Government was planning to bring 200,000 workers into the State to implement the National Development Plan.

Here was one of Europe's former economic basket cases, renowned for exporting its young in droves, boldly telling the world it would be setting up a skills-based selection system, no less, to recruit young workers to fill gaps in its over-stretched economy.

In what felt like one stroke, the word emigration, with all its haunting associations, was banished, to be replaced by the word immigration.

Of course the transition from being an exporter to an importer of people did not happen overnight and there have been many milestones on the road to recovery from the late 1950s, when this newspaper warned that Ireland could "die, not in the remote, unpredictable future, but quite soon".

However, if the Tanaiste's plans become a reality, the arrival of thousands of migrant workers from countries such as India, Estonia, Bulgaria and Hungary will represent the most meaningful milestone yet on the road to economic redemption.

Politicians, policy-makers and the wider community will have to face a new set of challenges no easier to solve than those which accompanied mass emigration in previous years.

Many European states arrived at this point decades ago. Germany, Belgium, France, Sweden and Britain have presided over years of immigration into their economies, albeit with mixed results. Even Spain, afflicted for years like the Republic with debilitating unemployment rates, has been bringing in thousands of "guest workers" since the mid-1980s.

So the Republic arrives to the mass immigration game late, but this could represent an opportunity, if we do not make the mistakes of those who went before.

The Government team behind the Harney plan would do well to study the experiences of the other European states before it plunges in with its own initiative.

It does not have to go too far. While Britain's mass immigration plans were formed against a colonial background, they were also prompted by skills shortages in the early 1950s. What also began in this period was what social scientists called "labour market segmentation", in which the new arrivals from the Commonwealth got the worst jobs.

As recorded in the best-selling book, Windrush (by Trevor and Mike Philips), although immigrants from the Caribbean were "skilled, semi-skilled or eminently qualified to become skilled workers", they still got the unskilled jobs. Not only that, sometimes they got nothing.

For example, even as recently as 1995 the ethnic minority unemployment rate was 19 per cent, compared to 8 per cent for the rest of Britain.

When combined with the settlement of ethnic minorities in the most decrepit parts of cities, a tide of resentment built up which often exploded into riotous expressions of contempt for the established order.

The lesson here is blunt - immigrants need to be given decent jobs and housing and not just the jobs no one else is prepared to do. The Government is hoping to prevent this by slotting workers into a wide range of areas, both high-skilled and low-skilled.

It is understood that the selection of workers will concentrate on filling vacancies in services, information technology and the trades. At the moment much of this is high-wage stuff, but the plan also envisages thousands taking up jobs in the catering, tourism and hotel industries - not traditionally associated with high wages or upward mobility.

Experience from across Europe shows that imprisoning immigrant workers in low-paid jobs only breeds resentment.

The Irish might also look to France, where the grimiest public housing projects are often dominated by ethnic minorities, such as Algerians, Turks and Moroccans.

This happened because planners decided in the early 1960s to establish a network of bidonvilles (shanty towns) around the perimeters of many French cities. Predictably, this legacy has spawned waves of violence and tension between these communities and French citizens.

The Harney plan is understood to be heavily skewed towards decentralising the immigrant workers. This is based on the realisation that Dublin is saturated in population terms and its infrastructure could simply not accommodate such a huge infusion of immigrants.

The settlement of the immigrant workers will be vital. Mixed housing - where immigrants live side by side with Irish people - is a must. But the Republic has not even been able to integrate Irish people living in private and local authority housing.

Tangibles such as housing and employment are one thing, but the Government plan will also have to deal with the cultural complexities of moving a group of 100,000 people into the State (the other 100,000 are expected to be Irish people returning).

Other EU states have not navigated these waters too successfully and lessons abound for the Irish. For example, the French have regularly agonised over whether their Muslim immigrant population can somehow adapt to French "norms".

The Islamic headscarf issue of a few years ago - where a nationwide furore was sparked by the refusal of three Muslim schoolgirls to remove their headscarves during class - showed how fragile the cultural question is there.

In Britain the same has been the case, with the Muslim population expressing dismay at the structure of British society and deciding to set up its own parliament. While this event was regarded as a stunt by many, it symbolised a turning away by some elements of that community from the dominant culture.

While governments will grapple with issues of dress and religion, language is even more vexing and is sure to be one of the biggest mountains the Government has to climb.

According to authors Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, in The Age of Migration, language takes on "a symbolic meaning which is central to ethnic group cohesion". If an immigrant group regards its native tongue as indispensable to its cultural make-up, is it right for the State to seek to sunder this? What would the Government here do if the young immigrants want to retain their language, and more crucially, if their children in time are raised speaking a foreign language?

Historically, countries have handled this question differently. Switzerland does not officially recognise immigrant languages, whereas Australia and Sweden promote a policy of maintaining immigrant culture and language.

They both provide a wide range of language services (interpreting and translating) and multicultural radio and television are funded by the Australian government.

In the United States the number of Spanish-speakers has exceeded English-speakers in big cities such as Los Angeles and Miami.

Even in Britain, where the issue is not on the same scale, changes to reflect the multilingual population base have had to be made. There are now multilingual options for people when communicating with the courts, the health services and state bureaucracies.

In schools in some parts of Britain, English merely exists alongside other languages. Some have argued that this damages education, as children have to grapple with too many languages while a distracted teacher does the same.

The Government here is utterly ill-equipped at this stage to embrace these kinds of changes. Irish pupils are struggling even to reach a high standard in Junior Certificate Irish, never mind having to exist in the fast world of multilingualism.

There are effectively two ways in which the Government can go - it can actively promote multiculturalism or go for a system in which ethnic differences are blurred and some kind of total integration of immigrants is attempted.

While attempting to force integration has all kinds of distasteful implications, the drive for multiculturalism has often met with failure in the past, too.

In Canada in 1971 an official policy of multiculturalism was declared, aimed at maintaining ethnic languages and cultures. This included employers insuring they employed sufficient numbers of minorities.

Like the affirmative action programme in the United States, this became unpopular with the Canadian public, and in 1993 a multicultural department was effectively killed off as the tide of public opinion hardened.

In Sweden the authorities offer Swedish classes, but also allow immigrant children instruction in their own language. The policy is to offer immigrants a choice between becoming Swedish or retaining their cultural identity.

Despite this apparently progressive policy, it has been opposed, and the far-right party, Sverigepartiet (SP, or the Sweden Party), has tried to make political capital out of it.