Immigrants at home and abroad

On its website, the Irish Immigration Centre says it is "concerned with the current anti-immigrant sentiment and the impact of recent immigration and welfare legislation on immigrants". And it hopes to play a key role in efforts to create "a more positive climate for immigrants". It has a drop-in centre which "offers new and established immigrants the opportunity to pursue their job-search in a friendly, supportive environment".

Its jobs board lists a section of jobs available. "By networking with employers and employment agencies, Bonnie Dwyer, our employment co-ordinator, is able to develop a wide range of employment opportunities for the hundreds of job-seekers who come through our doors each month."

But the Irish Immigration Centre isn't much use to Moldovans getting to grips with Irish hospitality or Poles being beaten up on the streets of provincial Irish towns or Nigerians being screamed at by drunken racists. It's not that Bonnie and her colleagues aren't decent, caring people. It's not that they're prejudiced or overworked or incompetent. It's just that they're a long way away. Three thousand miles, in fact. The Irish Immigration Centre is in Boston. Its immigrants are our emigrants.

The immigrants the IIC was set up to help are not what John O'Donoghue would call "genuine asylum-seekers". The proper words to describe them are seldom spoken in Ireland nowadays without a curl of the lip and a sneer in the voice: "economic migrants".

The centre began life in 1989 as a confidential telephone hotline. Confidential because most of its clients, unlike, for example, the 19 Moldovans who spent much of last week in Mountjoy jail, were what is politely called "undocumented". They slipped in on holiday visas but always intended to stay and work. They did not have residency visas or work permits. They eluded the law and evaded the authorities.

NO state, of course, would support such flagrant law-breaking by shifty aliens trying to batten on the hard-earned success of a foreign country. Groups like the IIC in Boston who take a sympathetic attitude to people without the proper papers trying to make their way in a foreign country must surely be condemned by any right-thinking government, especially one that treats even legal immigrants with contempt.

Which, of course, is why the Irish State has helped to fund the IIC for many years. And why, as recently as 1996, the then Tanaiste spoke for all of us when he singled it out for praise: "The Irish Government recognises and deeply appreciates the role played by organisations such as the Irish Immigration Centre in Boston in providing a wide range of services to newly arrived immigrants. I wish them continued success in the years to come."

That was just five years ago. Yet in an island that can't forget 1690, 1798 or 1916, five years can be a very long time. More bizarrely, the notion of ourselves as a nation of emigrants has been forgotten before it's even gone. People still emigrate from Ireland. You can still go into the Emigrant Advice office beside the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin and get leaflets telling you how to get work in England and continental Europe and the US.

Emigrant Advice is sponsored, by the way, by two branches of the State, the Department of Social Welfare and FAS. Yet, anyone going to the US looking for work is, by definition, an illegal immigrant. A working visa is supplied only at the request of a firm that wants to employ you.

THIS same State, though, is treating as dangerous criminals decent immigrants whose only crime is to want to earn money for their families with the sweat of their brows. Last Friday, after the High Court had ordered the release of 19 Moldovans who had spent four nights in Mountjoy in spite of arriving here with valid visas and passports, the only person in authority sent on to Morning Ireland was the director general of the prison service, Sean Aylward. This says everything.

Sean Aylward shouldn't have to take the rap for an outrage that was not of the prison service's making. But in defending the way the Moldovan men were treated, he did say two things that revealed a great deal about official attitudes.

While, like most people, he was outraged by photographs of the Moldovans being led into court in chains, his outrage was directed, not at what the pictures showed, but at the photographers who took them. They were, he claimed, in contempt of court and should therefore, presumably, be jailed. He also said that the only job of the prison service was to get the men securely to the court which would "decide on their guilt or innocence".

It apparently did not occur to him that the men had been charged with no crime and therefore could be neither innocent nor guilty.

How fitting, in this Kafkaesque world that the man who saved some honour for Ireland, by helping the Moldovans find work and giving them free accommodation, Bertie Dunne, is himself a former immigrant who spent 12 years in Australia. Maybe it was there that he picked up that weird saying of some old dogooder, long forgotten here: "As you would that men should do to you, do you also to them in like manner."

fotoole@irish-times.ie