The Government is misappropriating the term "green card" in its new Employment Permit Bill, the architect of the modern US green card system has said.
Former US congressman Bruce Morrison was speaking at a conference in Dublin yesterday, hosted by the Immigrant Council of Ireland.
He said the green cards for highly skilled migrant workers, proposed by the Department of Enterprise, failed to acknowledge that when a person immigrated into a country, "they are there permanently".
"I don't want to see Ireland appropriating the term green card when they mean work permit."
Though the length of time a person holding a green card would be allowed to stay has yet to be finalised, it is unlikely they will have permanent residency rights.
Mr Morrison said the centre-piece of the US immigration system was the green card which conferred a permanent right to live in the US, which could only be taken away if the holder committed a serious crime or had obtained the card fraudulently.
The Government here was treating Irish people "like children", he said, because it believed people were not ready to face up to the reality of immigration.
Attempts to fudge the issue and "pretend" that immigrants were here temporarily would "create disaster", because people would begin to see they were not going home.
"When politicians promise one thing and the people's experience is that something different is going on, you get an awful lot of angry people."
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