Illegal in Ireland, Irish Illegals: Diaspora Nation as Racial State |
Illegal in Ireland, Irish Illegals: Diaspora Nation as Racial State
Author:
Ronit Lentin a
DOI: 10.1080/07907180701699182
Publication Frequency:
4 issues per year
Abstract
This article examines the discursive political reformulation of Ireland
as 'diaspora nation', which, while explaining the narrowing of
citizenship entitlement of non-citizen migrants resident in Ireland in
the wake of the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, paradoxically also makes
sense of the juxtaposition of 'entitled' Irish illegals in the US with
'unentitled' illegal immigrants in Ireland. It uses social and
political theory - Goldberg's formulation of modern nation-states as
racial states, Foucault's theorisation of biopolitics, and Agamben's
positing of 'states of exception' and of the position of those people
falling outside the remit of citizenship as 'bare life', to discuss the
racialisation of immigration in twenty-first century Ireland. The
article uses the political juxtaposition of the 2006 hunger strike by a
group of Afghan asylum seekers, deemed illegal by the Irish immigration
regime, with Irish illegal immigrants in the US, considered entitled to
American citizenship, to illustrate Ireland's discursive shift to a
'diaspora nation' which arguably led to the 2004 Citizenship
Referendum.
IntroductionIn May 2006, 41 Afghan asylums seekers held a hunger strike in St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. The group, aged between 16 and 45, had been living in Ireland between one and five years. All were seeking leave to remain in Ireland and claimed that their action was precipitated by several of their asylum applications being turned down by the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner.1 According to media reports, most of the group had been trafficked into Ireland, travelling out of Afghanistan to Iran, Turkey, Italy, Germany and France before reaching Ireland. Osman Hotak, spokesperson for the group, said the Refugee Appeals Commissioner had not given full attention to their applications and had unlawfully refused most of them, and appealed to the 'people of Ireland to help them on the ground of compassion' (Gartland & Reid, 2006). The strike attracted much media attention and support by anti-racism groups demonstrating outside the Cathedral. Support was also offered by the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin John Neill, who visited the men. Although he deemed the action inappropriate, as the Cathedral lacked the facility to cope with the group, the Cathedral authorities made no move to remove the men (Gartland & Reid, 2006). The Department of Justice Equality and Law Reform refused to negotiate with the strikers, claiming, in the words of the then Minister for Justice Michael McDowell, that Ireland's immigration regime 'is one of the best in Europe' and is 'good and fair and transparent' (Lally, 2006). The six-day strike, which ended peacefully and without loss of life, rekindled the debate on the transparency and fairness of the Irish asylum system. But, perhaps contradictorily, state actors also linked it with the debate on the entitlement of Irish illegals in the US which was aired around the same time. The Minister for Justice insisted that Ireland's asylum system 'does not work on who decides to occupy a church or who decides to go on hunger strike', and that 'we don't deal with people in the lump so to speak. We deal with every individual case' (Gartland & Reid, 2006). At the same time, the Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern, speaking in Washington in May 2006, as the US Senate was preparing to discuss the immigration reform bill, while also praising the Irish immigration regime, explicitly juxtaposed the Cathedral hunger strike with the situation of illegal Irish immigrants in the US - dealt with 'in the lump' as it were, not as individual cases. According to Ahern, since most recent Irish illegals came to the US after 11 September 2001, they were therefore entitled to stay; their 'entitlement' to be in America, he insisted, cannot be compared with that of illegal immigrants in Ireland: 'When people try to compare what happened recently in Ireland with the Afghans with what's been happening here in the US, you're not comparing like with like. Completely different. When you look at the reference the UNHCR people made to the immigration system, they more or less said it's second to none in the world, that it's a transparent, fair process' (Staunton, 2006). On 11 June 2004, the government of the Republic of Ireland asked the electorate to vote in a referendum to amend article 9 of the Constitution to remove birth-right citizenship from children born in Ireland who do not have at least one parent who is an Irish citizen or who is entitled to Irish citizenship. Birth right (jus soli) citizenship was in existence since the establishment of the Free state in 1922. The proposed 2004 amendment did not include the children of the 1.8 million holders of Irish passports not born in Ireland who have one Irish grandparent and who are therefore entitled to blood-based (jus sanguinis) Irish citizenship without having to set foot in Ireland. 79.8 per cent of the electorate voted in favour of the government's proposal. Alice Feldman's (2006) theorisation of Ireland as the ultimate 'diaspora nation', while providing a sophisticated analysis of the centrality of diaspora to her respondents' self-understanding, does not take on board the normative meaning of diaspora for the discursive constructions of Irishness and otherness by the state. This article aims to theorise Ireland as a 'diaspora nation' in different terms, arguing explicitly, following Elaine Moriarty (2007), that the Citizenship Referendum was facilitated, inter alia, by the state expanding the notion of 'the Irish nation' in bloodline terms through formally conceptualising Irishness as including the Irish diaspora, a process publicly begun by former president Mary Robinson in the early 1990s (Gray, 1999). This discursive expansion - while initially aimed at emphasising the enrichment of Irishness through the diaspora - arguably led to enabling the substitution of the historical jus soli principle of Irish citizenship with jus sanguinis as conceptualised by the Citizenship and Nationality Act, enacted following the outcome of the 2004 Citizenship Referendum. This discursive political reformulation of Ireland as 'diaspora nation', while explaining the narrowing of citizenship entitlement of non-citizen migrants resident in Ireland, paradoxically also makes sense of the juxtaposition of 'entitled' Irish illegals in the US with 'unentitled' illegals in Ireland, which my example of the political juxtaposition of the 'illegal' Cathedral hunger strikers with Irish illegals in the US serves to illustrate. This article is underpinned by the argument that the 2004 Citizenship Referendum was a major turning point in the racialisation of Irishness, leading to the state being able to argue that neither it, nor nearly 80 per cent of the voters who supported the Referendum, can be dubbed 'racist'. Denying racism - and making a distinction between entitlements as was explicitly argued in the case of the hunger striking Afghan asylum seekers - enables the Irish State to continue to construct migrants as 'a problem' or at best as economic stopgaps, leading to what Etienne Balibar (1991) terms 'crisis racism'. It has also created a context in which, freed from accusations of racism, it becomes 'sensible' for the state to use biopolitical measures in 'managing', 'regulating' and 'mainstreaming' immigration, with the support of almost all social policy analysts, from the government-funded Equality Authority and National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism (NCCRI), to NGOs such as the Immigration Council of Ireland (ICI). At this point - and dialectically positioned against the Irish State directly campaigning for the legalisation of illegal Irish immigrants in the US - the politics of immigration control, which only a decade ago appeared to be the preserve of the 'loony right', becomes a core principle of the developing racist state (Lentin & McVeigh, 2006). I begin by contextualising my argument by briefly presenting some facts and figures on the racialisation of immigration in contemporary Ireland. The following sections use social and political theory to further develop my argument. The third section theorises Ireland, after David Theo Goldberg (2002), as a racial state, and, after Giorgio Agamben (2005) as a 'state of exception', where Foucauldian biopolitics structures state racism. This set of arguments assumes specific gendered meanings as 'non-national'2 women were made central to the public debates surrounding the Citizenship Referendum, and thus to new racial configurations in twenty-first-century global Ireland, as I argue in the fourth section. The fifth section explicitly theorises Ireland as 'diaspora nation' where citizenship is granted through blood rather than soil entitlements - an argument I illustrate by outlining the controversy surrounding citizen children of migrant parents, which preceded, and arguably enabled, the 2004 Citizenship Referendum. The sixth section further proposes that, in the 'Boston or Berlin' debate, Ireland is opting to resemble the US in regulating immigration in relation to the state's needs. This leads me to conclude by linking the position of Irish illegals with illegal immigrants in Ireland as the ultimate achievement of the 'diaspora nation' logic. Before outlining my theoretical argument, I would like to briefly present some facts and figures in relation to immigration in twenty-first-century Ireland. Immigration and Race in Twenty-first-Century IrelandThe 1990s advent of the so-called 'Celtic Tiger' economic boom (Kirby, 2002) transformed the situation where emigration outstripped in-migration into Ireland. In 1996 Ireland reached its 'immigration turning point' and has been a country of in-migration ever since (Ruhs, 2005). According to the 2006 census, the number of migrants, described as 'non-Irish nationals', living in Ireland has almost doubled in the past four years to 420,000, or 10 per cent of the population (O'Brien, 2007). However, claims based on 2006 census figures of a '53 per cent increase in the immigrant population between 2002 and 2006', and that 'foreign born residents' account for 'more than a quarter of the population in large areas of Dublin' (Kelly, 2007), are misleading. According to Gilmartin and Feldman (2007), such claims confuse immigrant numbers with place of birth, they pay little attention to migration history, and, moreover, the map accompanying The Irish Times report of these census figures uses the colour red to signify areas of high 'immigrant' concentration, indicating danger, and an illusion of 'immigrant invasion'. Indeed, close analyses of the census figures show that the majority of migrants come from the EU (275,776, of whom 100,000 are from the EU accession countries - headed by Poland and Lithuania), followed by Asia (25,326), Africa (24,425), the rest of Europe and the Americas (45,549), and many in-migrants are returning Irish citizens (Mac Éinrí, 2003). Moreover, the 2006 census 'ethnic question' - which, according to King-O'Riain (2006), was in fact a 'racial' question - found that nearly 95 per cent of the population are 'white', and just 1.3 per cent are 'Asians' and 1 per cent 'black'. This means that 'non-Irish nationals' mark a new racialisation of Irishness: whatever these migrants are, they are definitively 'not Irish' (Lentin & McVeigh, 2006: 37); driven by the 'success' of capitalism in Ireland, Irishness became racialised in new ways (McVeigh, 1996; Loyal, 2003). Theorising Ireland as a 'racial state', as I outline below, is enabled by analysing the state's approach to immigrants, divided between labour migrants deemed essential to the continuing growth of the Irish economy, and asylum seekers, considered illegal and 'bogus', even though they constitute less than 10 per cent of all immigrants (Lentin & McVeigh, 2006: 41). Colin Harvey (2003) posits a clear link between state sovereignty and the insistence by states on determining who is a refugee and who is entitled to enter their territory and become a citizen. Racial states distinguish between 'asylum seekers' and 'refugees' even though this distinction does not exist in the Geneva Convention. The notion of 'asylum seeker' is invented by racial states in order to deny refugee status to many people who say they are refugees and yet are denied recognition as such by states employing their own restricted and limited definition of what constitutes a refugee. According to Harvey, refugee law, with its focus on the award of a status, leaves too much to the state to decide. The purpose is always to 'secure national level protection' (Harvey, 2003: 17). Irish asylum applications were recorded at 39 in 1992, peaked at 11,632 in 2002 and declined to 4,323 in 2005, and 4,241 in 2006 (www.ORAC.ie). The state's boast that the decline in applications signals the success of Ireland's asylum policy omits to mention that about 4,000 per annum since 2004 have been refused leave to present asylum applications (Kelly, 2005). Throughout Europe, asylum seekers are demonised to conjure up cheat, liar, criminal, sponger; the figure of asylum seeker has become a caricature just as 'Blacks', 'Jews' and 'Gypsies' have been and still are, constituting, according to Schuster (2003), a racist asylum regime. In line with European racialisation of asylum seekers, the former minister in charge of the asylum process, Michael McDowell, showed little regard for the rights of people to apply for asylum in Ireland. In May 2005 in response to a Dáil question about the high cost of deportations, he claimed that asylum seekers tell 'cock and bull stories', stating he 'would prefer to interview these people at the airport, but the UN insists that I go through due process' (Holland, 2005).3 Deirdre Coghlan (2003) documents the trajectory from the paternalistic approach towards invited programme refugees, conceived as 'deserving and rights-bearing', by the Department of Foreign Affairs, to the restrictive approach towards asylum seekers, deemed as 'undeserving and fraudulent' by the Department of Justice. She argues that criminalising asylum seekers as undeserving was enabled by the earlier view of refugees as deserving and entitled to help, but also by the dialectic self-glorification of the Irish as generous helpers and donors - another way of juxtaposing entitlements, useful in campaigning for the legalisation of Irish illegals in the US while at the same time excluding illegals in Ireland. It bears remembering that the history of restrictive refugee policies in Ireland is not new: during the Nazi era Ireland admitted only some 60 Jewish refugees (Keogh, 1998). And, while having supposedly welcomed several groups of programme refugees - Hungarians in the 1950s, Chileans and Vietnamese in the 1970s, Iranian Bahá'is in the 1980s and Bosnians in the 1990s with varying degrees of 'open arms' (Ward, 1999; Fanning, 2002; Halilovic-Pastuovic, 2007), since the 1990s, the Irish State has used governmental technologies of dispersal, direct provision and deportations to control asylum seekers, as I now briefly illustrate. Although, unlike some other EU States, Ireland does not have a
policy of systematically detaining asylum seekers, the 1996 Refugee Act
does provide for the detention of asylum seekers in certain
circumstances, and asylum seekers are dispersed to direct provision
centres4 and are routinely detained in Irish prisons prior to deportation (Kelly, 2005). Steven Loyal argues that asylum seekers in Ireland 'have the least entitlement to social and material resources Before the enactment of the 1999 Immigration Act, the Minister for Justice's power to deport foreign nationals was based on the 1935 Aliens Act and the 1946 Aliens Order. In 2002 deportations were part of the commitment the coalition partners made in their Programme for Government, which vowed to 'maintain the integrity of the asylum policy' (Department of the Taoiseach, 2002), and the amended Refugee Act and the Immigration Act enabled increasing numbers of deportations.5 Deportations are costly,6 and they often separate parents from their children, left behind in Ireland as the parents are being deported. Despite this, the language used by the media to report deportations and the 'simplification' of the asylum process makes them sound routine and normal. In real terms, the Irish immigration regime has spawned the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service (INIS), a 'one stop shop' for immigration, asylum, visas and citizenship services and 'key linkages with the work permit system' providing, according to the Minister for Justice, 'a strong foundation for better service provision and the enhancement of enforcement strategies in these areas' (Mac Cormaic, 2005[emphasis added]). 'Race', racialisation and racism are complex terms. 'Race' must be understood not merely as a 'floating signifier' (Hall, 1997) - a way of reading bodily signs and giving them ethnically hierarchical meanings, but more importantly, as a political idea, used by states to classify people into populations and thus regulate them. 'Races' were fabricated (or socially constructed) categories used to differentiate between members of the nation and their enemies from without but also between 'us' and 'them' within, regardless of differences in appearance (Lentin & McVeigh 2006: 8-9). Racialisation denotes a process of domination and the relationship of power involved in the assigning of inferiority using bodily signifiers (Gilroy 1998; Lentin, 2004: 28). In the current climate, it has been difficult to discuss racism - which Hesse (2001) theorises as a 'political ideology aiming to regulate bodies' - not only because it remains contested and widely disavowed, but also because, in liberal democratic regimes, the vocabulary of racism is addressed through discussions of how to integrate ethnic minorities into the national majority with little consideration for the effects of racialisation (Law & Sayyid, 2007: 529). Crucially to my argument, however, as I discuss below, racism is 'inextricably linked both to the policy instituted by states and to the political climate engendered by governmental leaders playing the proverbial "race card"' even as they disavow it' (Lentin & Lentin, 2006: 2). To consolidate my argument I now turn to outlining the three-pronged theoretical foundations of this article, viewing Ireland as a 'racial state', and arguing that what we are witnessing is what Agamben terms a 'state of exception', and what Foucault terms a 'biopolitics of care'. Racial State of ExceptionGoldberg (2002) theorises all modern nation-states, each in its own way, as racial states, where race and state are defined in terms of each other, since states' main aim is to construct homogeneity, while appropriating difference through enacting multicultural (or in the Irish context, 'intercultural') policies, the aim of which is coping with what is constructed as the 'problem' of ethnoracial diversity. The racial state is a state of power, asserting control over those within the state and excluding others from entering the state. Through routinised technologies of governmentality such as constitutions, border controls, the law, policy making, bureaucracy, census categorisations, and also invented histories and traditions, ceremonies and cultural imaginings, modern states are defined by their power to exclude (and include) in racially ordered terms, to categorise hierarchically, and to differentiate. The modern state aims to keep racialised others out while also legislating against the so-called degeneracy of indigenous minorities (which explains the persistence of antisemitism and anti-nomadism and, more recently, Islamophobia). Goldberg outlines two traditions of thinking about racial states. The first, which he calls naturalism, fixes racially conceived 'natives' as pre-modern, and naturally incapable of progress. The second, which he calls historicism, elevates Europeans over primitive or underdeveloped others as a victory of western progress (Goldberg, 2002: 43).7 For the racial naturalist the racially subjugated are surplus labour at best, detritus at worst, while for the racial historicist, the racially immature are inserted into a narrative of developmental progress, which is only possible through mimicking the Euro-centre (Goldberg, 2002: 94-96). Understood as the space of white men of property, the racial state's historicist progressivism aims, through amalgamation and assimilation, to assist its racial others to 'undo their uncivilised conditions'. But beneath its liberalism, historicism camouflages racism, and is ultimately about the ordering zeal of modernity (Goldberg, 2002: 92-93). According to Goldberg, the law - as a technology of racial rule - is central to modern state formation, promoting ethnoracial categorisation and identification and shaping national identities through legislating on immigration controls and citizenship rights, shaping race in legal terms, and threading it into the fabric of the social (Goldberg, 2002: 141-147; Gilroy, 1987: 74). Goldberg's theorisation of all modern nation-states as racial states, while not building explicitly upon it, resonates with Michel Foucault's (1990) argumentation that when natural life becomes included in mechanisms of state power, politics turns into biopolitics, the territorial state becomes a 'state of population', and the nation's biological life becomes a problem of sovereign power, exercising what Foucault terms 'biopower'. Through a series of governmental technologies, biopower creates 'docile bodies' and the population - its welfare, health, longevity and wealth - becomes the goal of government. Foucault charts a shift from the power of pre-modern sovereigns to killing unwanted people to the modern state's biopower which is addressed at living beings, or their mass - as population. Put simply, Foucault charts the difference between the sovereign power of the old territorial state - 'to make die and let live', and modern biopower - 'to make live and let die'. If the old order exerted the right to kill, the new biopower aims to make the care of life the concern of state power, exercised by governmental technologies such as the hospital, the psychiatric clinic, the prison, the concentration camp, and in recent times, also the refugee camp and detention centre. In Society Must Be Defended (2003), Foucault uses the concept of biopower to document the birth of state racism. The duty to defend society, or defend the state against its migrant and indigenous others means that the modern state can scarcely function without racism, which he sees as the break 'between what must live and what must die' (Foucault, 2003: 254). Rather than serving one group against another, racism becomes a tool of social conservatism, a racism that society practices against itself, an act of constant purification and normalisation. In constructing what Goldberg terms homogeneity, the state not only denies its internal heterogeneities, it is also a normalising, regulating biopower state. Foucault's theory of racism is an expression of an ongoing social war nurtured by biopolitical technologies of purification. Thus racism is intrinsic to the nature of all modern states, occurring in varying intensities from social exclusion to mass murder. Biopower conceptualises the state as a 'body',8 and the use of state power becomes vital to protecting the 'life' of the nation, making genocide an obvious outcome of biopower when 'lives unworthy of living' are removed in order to protect the life of the volk, or, put another way, to defend the 'common good'. The Irish State's invocation of the 'common good' in relation to its immigration policies approximate Foucault's 'biopolitics of care', where the state envisages a 'happy balance between social diversity and social cohesion', to cite the former Minister for Justice,9 which means continuing labour migration needed to maintain Ireland's economic growth while limiting what the state constructs as 'illegal' immigration, and instituting 'colour blind' integration policies which employ Foucauldian strategies of surveillance, regulation and control (Lentin & McVeigh, 2006: 17). Giorgio Agamben (1995, 2005) draws on the Foucauldian concepts of biopower, biopolitics and its subjects, which he calls 'bare life', to develop an argument about the tendency of modern states to withdraw legal rights and protection from citizens and non-citizens alike. Although like Foucault, he sees biopower peak in the Nazi camps, Agamben updates the concept to the twenty-first century in relation to refugee camps and 'unlawful' combatants in detention camps such as Guantánamo Bay. In each of these spaces 'zones of exception' are formed. Agamben theorises the state of exception, after Carl Schmitt (1985), as state power's immediate response to extreme internal conflicts (Agamben, 2005: 2). Increasingly in states of exception the application of the law is suspended and different categories of people are reduced to what Agamben calls 'bare life', his re-articulation of the Roman category of homo sacer - he who can be killed with impunity yet who cannot be sacrificed (Agamben, 1995: 71). My key point is that these categories remain inescapably racialised when applied to humans who fall outside the boundaries of state citizenship, as I argue below. While the concepts of 'biopower', 'biopolitics' and 'states of exception' are still evolving and remain contested, I want to argue that they meet the core theoretical challenges in understanding contemporary racism and its relationship to the state, as they posit a fundamental connection between racism and nation-state biopolitics, particularly as liberal democratic states move away from blatant racial discrimination to a regime of regulation and control of sub-populations which fall short of full citizenship. In the wake of the Citizenship Referendum there is no longer any doubt that the Republic of Ireland can be theorised as a racial state of exception, though such theorisation must be firmly embedded in a global context as McVeigh and I argue (Lentin & McVeigh, 2006). My argument is that Ireland's exponential economic growth since the 1990s has meant its restructuring as an exclusive racist state, where labour migrants, needed to ensure continuing economic growth, are welcome (albeit on differing terms depending on their economic positionalities, Allen & Loyal, 2006), while asylum seekers, seen as superfluous to Ireland's economic growth, are increasingly prevented from landing to present their applications, and where citizenship parameters are being re-defined away from birth right (jus soli) to blood right (jus sanguinis), as I now go on to discuss. Citizenship From Jus Soli to Jus SanguinisExploring the origins of the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (after Arendt, 1979), Giorgio Agamben reminds us that it is precisely bare natural life, or the pure fact of birth, which is the bearer of rights, and that the nation - deriving etymologically from nascere, to be born - thus closes the open circle of man's birth (Agamben, 1995: 127-128). Following Foucault's theorisation of the transition from divinely authorised sovereignty to national sovereignty - a process which transmutes 'subject' into 'citizen' - Agamben argues that birth is the immediate bearer of sovereignty. In the passage from subject to citizen, however, birth becomes nation and rights are attributed to man (sic) solely to the extent that man becomes citizen. Thus the principle of 'blood and soil' (expressed most terrifyingly in the National Socialist vision of the world) has ancient juridical origins from Roman law through to the French revolution when jus soli (soil-based citizenship) develops into jus sanguinis (blood-based citizenship) in the transition from 'man' to 'citizen'. Hence the centrality (and ambiguity) of the notion of 'citizenship' in modern political thought; hence, too, the development, since the French Revolution, of regulatory provisions specifying which man was a citizen and which one not. According to Agamben, this is why refugees - who break the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality - represent such a disquieting element in that they put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis (Agamben, 1995: 130-131). To illustrate the transition from jus soli to jus sanguinis through the use of the law in controlling the citizenship rights of migrant populations, I now discuss the relationship between the Irish State and migrant parents of children born in Ireland, who were therefore Irish citizens. As part of the project of redefining ethnoracial populations,10 the Minister for Justice could claim in September 2003 that citizen children born to migrants parents - who the state re-defined 'Irish born children', racialising them as different from all other children born in Ireland - have certain, but not absolute rights to remain resident in Ireland.11 Irish jus soli access to citizenship, constitutionally granted to anyone who was a citizen of the Irish Free State before the 1937 constitution, and confirmed by the 1956 and 1986 Nationality and Citizenship Act, was re-confirmed in the amended Article 2 of the Irish Constitution, as part of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA):
While the debates on immigrants' citizenship and residency rights occasioned by increased in-migration obscured the fact that jus soli citizenship right was not merely a consequence of the GFA, the GFA amendment did mean, as was ruled in the 1990 Fajujonu Supreme Court case, that migrant parents of children born in Ireland, who were thus Irish citizens, had a claim to residency in Ireland to provide 'care and company' to their citizen child. This process, which resulted in several thousands migrant parents gaining residency rights, was overturned in January 2003 when the Supreme Court ruled in the Lobe and Osayande appeal, that 'non-national' parents no longer had a strong case to be allowed to remain in Ireland to bring up their child (Maddock & Mallon, 2003). The Lobe and Osayande case involved two families of Czech Roma and Nigerian origin respectively against whom deportation orders were made. While the parents claimed that their decision to remain resident was in their children's best interest, the Supreme Court ruling privileged the state's right to deport, and the 'integrity of the asylum process' over these citizen children's rights. The media debates following the January 2003 Supreme Court ruling exposed a contradiction between nationality and citizenship. The jus sanguinis-based rights to Irish citizenship allows up to third generation Irish emigrants to claim Irish citizenship, while at the same time, the state was contesting the jus soli citizenship rights accorded to children of migrants and consolidated by the GFA insertion of Article 2 into the Constitution. The Lobe and Osayande court's ruling illustrates several of my
theoretical points. First, it illustrates the centrality of the law as
a governmental technology employed by the racial state. Arguably
upholding 'control in the face of the anarchic, of order in the face of
disorder' (Goldberg, 2002: 94), Chief Justice
Ronan Keane was able to rule that the state 'was entitled to take the
view that the orderly system of dealing with immigration and asylum
applications should not be undermined by persons seeking to take
advantage' of the system. According to Siobhán Mullally (2003),
the ruling proves that 'the protection of a child's claim to reside
within a state (is) made dependent on the legal status and behaviour of
her or his parents
In the wake of the ruling, on 19 February 2003, the Minister for Justice removed the process whereby an immigrant parent could seek permission to remain in Ireland solely on the grounds of having a child citizen. The abolition of the process resulted in 11,500 migrant parents of Irish citizens becoming candidates for deportation as of July 2003. For almost two years the Minister declared his unwillingness to reverse his decision and recognise en masse migrant parents of Irish citizens who had lawfully applied for residency. Among the 341 people deported between 2002 and February 2005 there were at least 20 Irish citizen children.12 As late as November 2004 the Minister said in reply to a Dáil question that any amnesty for migrant parents of so-called 'Irish born children' would cause 'chaos' (O'Brien, 2004). However, rhetoric aside, on 15 January 2005, six months after the state won the Citizenship Referendum with a four to one majority, the decision was reversed and the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform announced a new application process for migrant parents of Irish citizen children born before 1 January 2005. Of the 18,000 applications, 16,693 were granted (DJLR, 2006), although the residency rights won were temporary and contingent upon successful applicants not seeking family reunification rights (Lentin & McVeigh, 2006: 54). Robbie McVeigh and I argue that the Citizenship Referendum represented an act of political brutality disguised as upholding the 'common good'. Like the Nuremberg laws in Nazi Germany, the Jim Crow laws in the American south and the Apartheid laws in South Africa, it 'denationalised' people, stripping people of rights and citizenship. In doing this, the Referendum created a bizarre new category of people who remain 'part of the Irish nation' (the amended article 2 of the Constitution was left untouched), yet have their citizenship removed, deemed to have insufficient connection to the island of Ireland to qualify for citizenship. Ireland has thus created its own version of Agamben's homo sacer - people reduced to 'bare life', stripped of all legal and civil rights (Agamben, 1995; Lentin & McVeigh, 2006: 55). It is worthwhile noting that persuasive as Agamben's theorisation is, and bearing in mind the indelible link he makes between birth and nation, Agamben does not explicitly engender the meanings of the shift from jus soli to jus sanguinis citizenship entitlements. As the producers or future generations, and the symbolic tropes of nations (Yuval-Davis & Anthias, 1989), women are marked and controlled differently from men, despite universal claims to gender equality. As the nation-state makes nativity the foundation of its sovereignty, when they step outside ethno-national or moral boundaries, (and because they are the producers of future generations of 'racially undesirable' others), women are often banned as impure and transgressive (Yuval-Davis, 1997). Contextualising the arrival of asylum seekers in Ireland in global restructuring, global capital accumulation and global wars, Eithne Luibhéid (2004) argues that racial states, including Ireland, need asylum seekers in order to 'redraw racial and national boundaries that have become destabilised in the contemporary era'. More specifically, Luibhéid argues that discourses and practices that target childbearing women asylum seekers provided the Irish government with a way of reconstituting the Republic as a sovereign space, while also generating new modes of racialisation and racial hierarchies within Ireland. Put simply, Luibhéid argues that childbearing asylum seeking women 're-nationalise the nation'. To further link the changing parameters of citizenship in the Republic, the racialisation of 'illegal' asylum seekers and migrant parents, and the campaign to grant citizenship to Irish illegals in the US, I now shift the discussion to theorise Ireland as 'diaspora nation'. Diaspora NationThe racial state conceptualises migrants as either economically useful - in the case of labour migration (Allen & Loyal, 2006; Lentin & McVeigh, 2006: 58-76), or as problematically surplus - in the case of asylum seekers and migrant parents of Irish citizen children. Such conceptualisation, I want to argue, owes above all to the discursive shift to an unbounded view of the 'Irish nation' as including a bloodline diaspora, and has arguably led to the 2004 Citizenship Referendum. This process was explicitly initiated by former president Mary Robinson, and supported by several social and political commentators including Irish Times columnists Fintan O'Toole and John Waters (Moriarty, 2007). Alice Feldman theorises Ireland as the ultimate 'diaspora nation' in
terms of the extent to which 'fluidity and movement of people are
defining features of the nation, from the early arrival of Vikings and
Normans While Feldman provides a sophisticated analysis of the centrality of diaspora to her respondents' self-understanding, based on 'identity narratives and tales of not/belonging to re-present the "psychic maps" according to which the Other is navigated and scripted' (Feldman, 2006: 103), her analysis does not take on board the normative meaning of diaspora for the discursive constructions of Irishness and otherness by the state. Breda Gray argues (1999, 2002) that one means of bringing together discourses of emigration and immigration
into engagement with each other is through the term 'diaspora', a
concept which, in the Irish case, encapsulates discourses of historic
trauma in relation to the Famine and associated emigration, allowing
emigrants to keep in contact with their country of origin, and
self-produce a transnational identity. Gray (1999)
cites former President Mary Robinson's speech to a joint session of the
Houses of the Oireachtas entitled 'Cherishing the diaspora' as an
example of the wish to extend the remit of Irishness to include the
diaspora in enriching terms: '[O]ur relation with the diaspora beyond
our shores is one which can instruct our society in the values of
diversity, tolerance, and fair-mindedness. The men and women of our
diaspora represent not simply a series of departures and loss Like Robinson, Irish Times columnist Fintan O'Toole presented the expansion of Irishness beyond a territorially bounded nation, claiming, that '[e]migration means, quite simply, that the people and the land are no longer coterminous' (1994: 18). However, far from simply expanding the notion of Irishness beyond the national borders, Elaine Moriarty (2007) argues that this discursive shift from boundedness to a territorially unbounded Irishness had the unintended outcome of enabling the Citizenship Referendum. I want to further develop this by arguing that the Referendum's roots in the expanding diaspora nation mean that, at the same time as the state racialises and excludes its unwanted racial others, it can continue to campaign for the rights of its own (illegal) diaspora in the US - conceptualised, as are descendants of Irish American emigrants, in bloodline terms - as I now go on to discuss. Illegalising Asylum Seekers, Legalising Irish Illegals
The history of political leaders in the Republic of Ireland looking after the interest of Ireland's exiled sons and daughters precedes President Robinson; in fact it dates back to the so-called 'father of the nation' Arthur Griffith, who, already in 1904, during the boycott of the Jews in Limerick, wrote in The United Irishman: 'No thoughtful Irishman or woman can view without apprehension the continuous influx of Jews into Ireland and the continuous efflux of the native population. The stalwart men and bright-eyed women of our race pass from our land in a never-ending stream, and in their place we are getting strange people alien to us in sympathy, from Russia, Poland, Germany and Austria - people who come to live amongst us, but who never become of us' (United Irishman, 23 April 1904, cited in Keogh, 1998: 42). 'Looking after our own' is a powerful political discourse,
particularly when it relates to Ireland's emigrants. Thus, in October
1987, with emigrants leaving Ireland at the rate of 46,000 per year
throughout the 1980s and with unemployment around 15 per cent, the then
Minister for Foreign Affairs Brian Lenihan could justify emigration as
a contemporary 'Irish solution' to a contemporary 'Irish problem': 'I
don't look on the type of emigration we have today as being of the same
category as the terrible emigration of the last century. What we have
now is a very literate emigrant who thinks nothing of coming to the
United States and going back to Ireland and maybe on to Germany and
back to Ireland again. Ironically, around the same time, the then US House Speaker Senator Tip O'Neill explained that he voted 20 years earlier, in 1965, for a comprehensive Immigration Bill that arguably killed emigration from Ireland, because he was asked by the Irish government to prevent a brain drain, even though people in his neighbourhood were asking him to enable their cousins and relatives to come to the US (O'Dowd, 2006). According to Niall O'Dowd, editor of The Irish Voice and founder and chairman of the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform, while this did not end the brain drain from Ireland, it did ensure that successive generations of Irish people who did come to America ran 'smack into the illegal alien issue'. Although most of the US 11-12 million illegal immigrants are from
Mexico and Central America, about 50,000 Irish people are among the 3
million illegal immigrants from countries outside Latin America.
Speaking about their plight, Celine Kenneally, executive director for
the Irish Immigration Pastoral Center in San Francisco, an advice and
referral service sponsored by the Irish Catholic Conference of Bishops,
told the San Francisco Chronicle: 'They are in as dire straits
as any other ethnic group. They cannot get driver's licenses, it's
harder to open bank accounts, they cannot travel home and return again.
Although most Irish immigrants reside in the United States legally, in recent decades, most arrivals from Ireland have overstayed their visas and become illegal immigrants, because the US government is issuing fewer work visas. A 1991 programme offered legal permanent residence to about 16,000 undocumented Irish, but there has been no legalisation plan since then. I am interested here primarily in how the very real difficulties
faced by Irish illegals in post-9/11 USA have become another way of
strengthening bloodline Irishness, particularly when compared to the
very real difficulties faced by asylum seekers in today's Ireland.
Thus, in defence of legalising Irish illegal immigrants in the US,
Niall O'Dowd wrote in February 2006, echoing
Ministers McDowell and Ahern, that 'Ireland has one of the most liberal
immigration systems of any country', although he highlights the
'relative difficulty for Americans to emigrate there'. O'Dowd suggests
that this difficulty (for American migrants in Ireland) be sorted
through a bilateral agreement between the two states, focusing on
legalising Irish illegals in the US (yet ignoring the plight of
non-American illegal immigrants in Ireland). The reasons cited by
O'Dowd in singling out Irish illegals in post-9/11 America all play the
tune of Irish exceptionalism: 'If a deal is not reached, the footprints
of the Irish in America will be elided It is hard to imagine a similar tone in the debate evoked by the
Cathedral hunger strike. Not even the most ardent supporters of asylum
seekers in Ireland would argue that 'if a deal is not reached In the run-up to the 2008 US presidential elections, the campaign to legalise Irish illegals was hotting up already in spring 2007, as (Irish-linked) Democratic senator Ted Kennedy and (Irish-linked) Republican senator John McCain were planning to introduce legislation that would allow most of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the US to remain in the country. Addressing a rally of some 2,500 undocumented Irish immigrants in March 2007, senator Kennedy said the issue was about 'defining our humanity', while New York senator Chuck Schumer thanked the crowd for 'a great warm Irish welcome on a snowy Washington day' before shouting 'Tiocfaidh Ár Lá' (the slogan adopted by the IRA, meaning 'Our Time Will Come') (Staunton, 2007). I want to suggest that legalising Irish illegals in the US is a vital link in the diaspora nation chain: expanding the conceptual boundaries of Irishness beyond Irish soil to accord second and third generation emigrants Irish citizenship while narrowing such access to humans born on Irish soil is a new stage in the racialisation of Irishness. While the majority of Irish illegals seeking legalisation in the US are white, the majority of illegal immigrants seeking legalisation in Ireland are racialised as non-white (or not quite white). It is also a logical lead up to the demand, by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern on his annual St Patrick's Day visits to Washington, for rights for undocumented Irish migrants in the US. However, as Fintan O'Toole reminds us, 'the appeal is not for undocumented migrants in the United States to be given a proper status. It is for Irish undocumented migrants in the US to be given a proper status' (O'Toole, 2006: i), a further expansion of the diaspora nation in both directions. To complete my argument, I now turn to discussing the Americanisation of the Republic's immigration regime. Diaspora Nation Between Boston and Berlin?In 2000, the then Tanaiste Mary Harney expressed her opposition to further European integration, saying it would be against the interest of Ireland, which, she said, was spiritually 'a lot closer to Boston than Berlin'. The debate about the two models - one favouring low taxes and low welfare provisions, the other favouring the reverse - was sharpened by statements about Ireland's relationship with the US and its attractiveness to American business.13 It is worth noting that, like the US, Ireland's 'Celtic Tiger' economy is also characterised by the polarisation of wealth - international statistics have shown consistently that the Irish Republic represents the most unequal society in the western world (Coulter, 2003: 22). The US model extends to the Irish State's approach to immigration, despite state-actors' claims to transparency and openness. The hegemonic view of Irishness as correlated with whiteness and Catholicism has come into conflict with the labour market imperatives of the increasingly global Irish economy. However, the need for immigrant labour, as Loyal (2003) reminds us, is underpinned by the racialisation of that labour, as is obvious from the state's treatment of those immigrants and asylum seekers it does not deem economically necessary. The Irish migration regime received further reinforcement with the proposal, in September 2006, of a new Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill by the former Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform. In the spirit of the post-9/11 'global civil war' (Agamben, 2005), the bill, if enacted, will require all non-EEA nationals in Ireland to carry biometric identity cards, known as residence permits, identifying carriers as either asylum seekers, short-term residents, or long-term residents (including those with refugee status). According to this draconian proposed legislation, non-EEA nationals who commit a range of offences, including traffic offences, will face summary deportation. Other provisions are a prohibition on foreign nationals to change their names, except where authorised, and to marry without first notifying the Minister. A marriage performed in breach of this condition will be void. The Minister may refuse to allow the marriage for a variety of reasons, including public security and public policy. Asylum seekers and holders of non-renewable residence permits may not marry at all. Persons who take part in such marriages or officiate at them or 'facilitate' them will be guilty of an offence. It is also expressly stated that marriage confers no right of residence (Mac Éinrí, 2006). Announcing the bill, the minister also announced the incorporation of the Office of the Refugee Application Commissioner into a broader body dealing with all immigration and refugee matters - further centralising the control exercised by the racial state on its immigrant others.14 At the same time, policies are being developed across government departments aimed at encouraging people with sought-after qualifications, skills and entrepreneurial abilities to consider Ireland. While such people will qualify for 'long term resident status', their children, even if born in Ireland, will not enjoy jus soli citizenship rights. My argument is that reconceptualising Ireland as a diaspora nation whose off-shore (emigrant) children are granted citizenship access in preference to its on-shore (immigrant) children, pushes Ireland closer to Agamben's 'state of exception', where the line between democracy and absolutism is getting thinner. In a state of exception, legal/illegal instruments such as the US Patriot Act and the proposed Irish Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill allow the state to erase the individual's legal status at will. Although it has its juridical roots in extreme internal conflicts, Agamben charts the development of the state of exception not merely in totalitarian regimes, but also, alarmingly, in contemporary democracies which often erode the legislative powers of parliaments (today often limited to ratifying measures that the executive issues through decrees having the force of law, as we saw in the lead up to the Iraq war [Agamben, 2005: 7]). Highlighting security and the Foucauldian imperative that 'society must be defended' from its racial others allows racial states, each in its own way, to extend the state of exception in order to defend the 'common good', leaving those outside their protection in a liminal zone between legality and illegality. As Agamben puts it, 'at once excluding bare life and capturing it within the political order, the state of exception actually constituted, in its very separateness, the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rested' (1995: 9). As the Irish racial state talks the intercultural talk and walks the diversity walk (Lentin & McVeigh, 2006), the Cathedral hunger strikers, understandably reluctant to return to war-torn Afghanistan, continue to live in a liminal twilight zone between legality and illegality, bare life at the mercy of the sovereign power of the Irish diaspora nation. With inequalities of wealth and differential treatment of immigrants, far from offering a real alternative to US neo-liberalism, Irish State practices, including becoming a net importer of people, and differentiating between those useful to the economy and those superfluous to Celtic capitalism, represent, according to Allen (2003), political methods intended to advance the project of privatisation, deregulation and redistribution in favour of the wealthy, and at the same time upholding diasporic bloodline links with Irish illegals in the US-far more akin to Boston than to Berlin. ConclusionThis article used several strands of social and political theory to link the Republic of Ireland's policy towards people it considers illegal immigrants with its support for Irish illegal immigrants in the United States. Theorising Ireland as a racial state was facilitated by a survey of its immigration regime which favours labour migrants as useful economic commodities over asylum seekers and migrant parents of Irish citizen children, whose entitlement to remain resident in Ireland was upturned by the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, which reversed the historical soil based citizenship with blood based entitlement. The article further posited Giorgio Agamben's theorisation of those people who fall outside the remit of Irish citizenship entitlement as 'bare life', and suggested that in striving for both social diversity and social cohesion, the state is implementing a Foucauldian biopolitics of care, where immigrants are managed, regulated and controlled. The article then built on the conceptualisation of Ireland as 'diaspora nation', explicitly introduced in the 1990s, to argue that while members of the Irish diaspora are accorded citizenship rights, regardless of residence in Ireland's territorial boundaries, new diasporas in Ireland are denied citizenship, which, in post-Referendum Ireland, is no longer based on birth on the Irish soil. To exemplify my argument, the article juxtaposed the 2006 hunger strike by Afghan asylum seekers, deemed by the state as 'illegal immigrants' entitled to neither residence nor citizenship, with its support for the demand of Irish illegal immigrants in the US to be legalised. I concluded by arguing that Ireland is following the US not only in its economic policies, but also in its immigration regime. NotesI am grateful to Dr Elaine Moriarty, Dr Robbie McVeigh and to the editors for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. 1. Kundnani (2007: 95) reports that some 20,000 Afghans sought asylum in Britain in the 1990s, many fleeing the brutality of the Taliban. While these asylum seekers were initially recognised as genuine - in 1999, 800 out of 805 cases were granted leave to remain in Britain - the Home Office then began treating Afghanistan as a safe country, leading to three-quarters of Afghan asylum seekers to be rejected in 2000; yet in 2001 the bombing of Afghanistan by US and UK forces was justified by the need to remove an oppressive regime. Due to its Common Travel Area with Britain, Ireland is clearly following British policies in this regard. 2. A euphemism for non-EU/EEA migrants. 3. It is not surprising that this disdain for the principle of protecting refugees leads to making the actual process of decision making far from transparent, despite claims to the contrary: of the 63,399 applications between 1995 and 2004, only 6,304 were recognised as refugees (Ruhs, 2005: 3). 4.
At the end of March 2005, there were 7,280 asylum seekers in 68 direct
provision centres (four reception and 64 accommodation centres) of whom
1,678 asylum seekers (21 per cent) had been residing in direct
provision for over two years. A quarter (2,094) of those living in
direct provision centres, are under the age of four. In addition to
basic accommodation and meals, each asylum seeker receives 5. Between 1999 and 2005, 2,268 deportations were carried out, and 2,299 were 'voluntarily repatriated' by July 2004 (www.irishrefugeecouncil.ie). Top countries of origin of recipients of deportation orders were and continue to be Romania, Nigeria, China and Moldova. 6. In May 2005 the Minister for Justice admitted in the Dáil to spending 50,200 deporting just one person (Holland, 2005). 7. See Lentin and McVeigh (2006: 11) and Ní Shuinéar (2002) for a discussion of racial naturalism and historicism in the Irish context. 8. Interesting here is Burleigh and Wipperman's (1999) theorisation of the Nazi state as the ideal type racial state, where the object was the protection of the body of the volk. 9. Speaking at the 2005 McGill Summer School, cited in Lentin and McVeigh (2006: 17). 10. Also applied to Travellers, whom the Minister for Justice denied the status of an ethnic group (see Lentin & McVeigh, 2006). 11. Written answer to Dáil question no. 1235 by Minister of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Michael McDowell to Sinn Féin Dáil deputy Aengus Ó Snodaigh, 30 September 2003. 12. Dáil question, 16 February 2005. 13. In Harney's words: 'it is remarkable that a country with just 1 per cent of Europe's population accounts for 27 per cent of US Greenfield investment in Europe' (Brennock, 2000). 14. Coming into office in May 2006, the new Minister for Justice, Brian Lenihan, expressed his support for McDowell's proposed bill, committing to present it to the Oireachtas in Autumn 2007. References
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abstract
they are marginalised, excluded, poor, and, in many respects, they lack freedom' (Loyal, 
19.10 per adult and