The issue of asylum in Ireland has become increasingly contentious and fraught over the past year. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said arrests will be made after a spate of arson attacks against properties linked to housing asylum seekers.

Protests have been held outside hotels and shelters across the country. And, notoriously, the riots that took place in Dublin in November 2023 were sparked by claims spread on social media that several violent stabbings in the city centre were carried out by an immigrant – who turned out to be a naturalised citizen.

A perfect storm has unfolded in Ireland in recent years. The number of asylum seekers has increased sharply (to over 13,000 per year in the past two years) and many Ukrainians have sought temporary protection (about 100,000 since the war began). All the while, Ireland has been experiencing a housing crisis. Record numbers of Irish people are in emergency accommodation and there has been a surge in rough sleeping.

This creates the impression that asylum seekers may somehow be responsible for the housing crisis or competing with Irish people for scarce resources. That’s certainly an impression that has been cleverly seized on by the far right, which has been spreading damaging tropes and seeking to capitalise on protests by local communities against the opening of new asylum reception centres. This is therefore a good moment to dispel some of the leading myths.

‘The inn is full’

When a County Galway hotel that was due to accommodate asylum seekers was set on fire in December, a local Fianna Fáil councillor said that “the inn is full”. The councillor has been reported to his party over the comments but not before he’d already given the impression that Ireland is inundated with asylum seekers.

There has been a marked increase in the number of people claiming asylum in Ireland over the past two years, placing Ireland for the first time in the top half of EU member states as an asylum destination. However, Ireland received just 1.4% of the almost 1 million people applying for asylum in EU countries in 2022. By contrast, Germany, France, Spain, Austria and Italy received, between them, almost 75% of asylum applications. When further compared with impoverished asylum-hosting countries, any suggestion that Ireland is overburdened does not hold up.

‘Asylum seekers are causing the housing crisis’

Given the accommodation crisis in Ireland, it is understandable that some people think asylum seekers are competing with Irish citizens for scarce resources. However, the two problems – the accommodation crisis facing Irish people and the accommodation crisis facing asylum seekers – are distinct from one another, even if they overlap.

The former problem is linked to successive government policies relating to homelessness, housing delivery, planning laws, house and rent prices and support for buyers and renters. The latter problem is a product of direct provision.

Direct provision is the Irish system of asylum accommodation that has existed since 2000, whereby private contractors profit enormously from providing bed and board to asylum seekers.

The accommodation is often overcrowded, the environment unsafe for children, the food unnourishing and the general conditions a risk to mental health. Direct provision has been the subject of numerous critical domestic and international reports, not one but two major government reviews and a government white paper.

The weekly allowance paid to asylum seekers places them below the poverty line (€38.80 per week per adult, €29.80 per child). Since the government relies on the private market for supply, it cannot guarantee that enough people will be able to get direct provision places. As a result, asylum seekers are also placed in emergency accommodation or, increasingly, have to sleep rough (more than 600 asylum seekers are currently on the streets).

And yet nothing has been done to dismantle direct provision and replace it with something else. Indeed, only since the issue has gained prominence in recent weeks have tangible alternatives been advanced by government ministers.

The idea of a number (perhaps six) state-owned reception centres has been mooted. While this would be an improvement on private service providers, questions remain about how a public system would work, particularly in light of Ireland’s history of institutional care, such as in Magdalene laundries and industrial schools.

‘Asylum seekers are dangerous’

Asylum seekers, and particularly single young men, are often perceived as a dangerous group. Their undocumented status and gender make them highly suspect.

Many asylum seekers are indeed undocumented – but not by choice. They end up that way because EU countries including Ireland place asylum-producing countries on visa blacklists, so people coming from those countries will probably be denied a visa.

It is no surprise, then, that asylum seekers have to enter the state on false or fraudulent documentation or via clandestine means, on boats and in shipping containers. Nonetheless, once they claim asylum, extensive checks are done, including cross-checking fingerprints with various EU databases.

Nor is the gender of asylum seekers relevant. In fact, because of conditions in their country of origin and during the perilous journey to get here, many asylum-seeking men are likely to have been victims of criminality and human rights abuses.

The main criminal acts linked to asylum are the trespass and public order offences associated with the protests against new asylum centres, the arson attacks, the intimidation of asylum seekers and the spreading of lies about this vulnerable group.

Ciara Smyth, Assistant Professor, School of Law, University of Galway

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A Nigerian man working in Ireland has voiced his fears of the danger he and other immigrants currently face after a violent riot broke out in Dublin on Thursday.

The man, who simply identified himself as a Nigerian scholar teaching at Whitehall College for Further Education, said that he was worried about his safety.

“This morning, I am on my way to work. I work at Whitehall College for Further Education here in Dublin. There was a riot here against foreigners here and we had to run for dear life. As you can see, it is dangerous for a black man like me to be here. I am trying to find a way out before I get killed by these angry protesters who don’t want to see a black man (here),” the teacher said.

“I have been in Ireland for a while now, and I have never seen something like this where foreigners are being attacked. I am a lecturer here, who is doing something good for my community. It is a shame that our government is so bad that we end up here. I studied in this country. I did my undergraduate and post-graduate studies here.

“Now, I teach here. It is just a shame that my country is so terrible that it is not adaptable for anyone that we all have to end up in a foreign land where we face abuse at all levels. From our earnings, we pay our rent, mortgage, insurance and so on. The little money that is left, you have to send it to Nigeria.”

This Nigerian said that it was a shame that some extremists wished to get rid of immigrants who contributed to the growth of Ireland.

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Nigeria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Nigerians in Diaspora Commission (NiDCOM) have made no official statement on the state of Nigerians in Dublin days after the riot.

Abike Dabiri Erewa, NiDCOM’s Chairman, said that government must make Nigeria more conducive for Nigerians in order to prevent them from leaving to uncertain conditions abroad. Erewa was, however, passing this comment in response to Nigerians stuck in asylum centres in Canada.

“I agree the government must make the environment conducive for its citizens, but let’s reduce the temptation to go and get into a tougher place; don’t leave to where you thought was a greener pasture to something worse or more deadly,” Erewa said in a TV interview on Sunday.

The Dublin riot broke out after unconfirmed reports claimed that a man who stabbed a handful of children was an Algerian immigrant. Some groups spread rumours of an immigrant attacking children, and anti-immigrant groups went berserk on the streets of Dublin.

They burnt cars, bikes and a train on the city’s metro line. Ireland’s riot police struggled to quell the violent uprising till Friday.

READ ALSO: Clare Jagunna, the Nigerian Woman Helping Pregnant African Immigrants Adapt to Life in Canada

Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s prime minister, said that he was shocked by the incident.

The authorities were yet to reveal the identity of the stabbing culprit or confirm if the initial attack was carried out by an immigrant at press time. Over 30 people have been arrested in connection to the riots so far.

Melissa Tandiwe Myambo, University of the Witwatersrand

Leading politicians in the UK, including the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, are of African Indian descent. Other high profile examples include the country’s two most recent home secretaries – Priti Patel, who served from 2019 to 2022, and her successor Suella Braverman, whose tenure ended abruptly on 13 November when she was fired by Sunak.

The home secretary is responsible for law enforcement in England and Wales, national security and immigration.

Sunak’s grandparents left the Punjab in northern India for east Africa in the 1930s. His mother was born in Tanzania and his father in Kenya.

Patel’s parents were immigrants from Uganda; she was born in the UK and cherishes her “deeply held British values.”

Braverman, too, was born in Britain. Her mother grew up in Mauritius, a former French colony, and her father is of Kenyan Indian origin. Braverman calls herself “a child of the British Empire”.

All three are part of the African Indian diaspora. Do they tell us anything about the cohort of people who have had the same experiences as the children of migrants and as part of a diaspora?

I have researched the Indian and African diasporas and found that, in fact, members of diasporas have supple and dynamic political positions. Sunak, Braverman and Patel, among others, provide real life examples of how diasporic people exhibit a wide range of political affiliations, outlooks and opinions.

Some researchers used to believe that diasporic and immigrant communities would function as a “unified polity” – they might all vote the same way. This thinking holds true for many whose work focuses on diasporas and politics – but for those, like me, who research diasporas and migration, there’s been a shift in the last decade or so towards more complex understandings. My research is qualitative, allowing me to delve more deeply into the complexity and idiosyncrasy of diasporic communities.

Diasporas on the move

An African Indian is a member of the Indian diaspora whose family is or has recently been Africa-based.

In the early 1970s, former Ugandan president Idi Amin implemented several hostile, xenophobic policies. In 1972 he ordered all Indian Ugandans to leave the country. Many East African Indians, including those from Tanzania and Kenya, emigrated because of open discrimination against them, heading to countries like Canada and the UK in greater numbers.

It wasn’t just Amin who drove those of Indian descent from the continent. Throughout the 20th century, and especially after the second world war, Britain’s colonial subjects started arriving in the UK. In prior centuries, British imperialism and settler colonialism also spurred many waves of migration, including some of those of the African Indian diaspora.

A diasporic group lives in a geographical location other than their original homeland. Researchers have long been interested in whether members of ethnic or religious diasporas would act as a bloc of unified political actors in influencing their homeland politics or the political climate in their new adoptive countries.

Dynamic, discursive identity

Researchers have highlighted how diasporas can “rediasporise” as children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren move to new locations. Members of diasporas may choose to identify with multiple homelands and host countries over time.

But they may choose to identify with one more than the other or do something else entirely. Take Braverman: although a member of the Indian and African diasporas, she has been outspoken about tightening the UK’s immigration policy. She’s on record as having said:

Look at migration in this country – the largest group of people who overstay are Indian migrants.

Expecting her to have an automatic affiliation with her past isn’t reasonable. Recent scholarly work on diasporic identity has sought to understand identity not as static and “essentialist” but dynamic and discursive. It is also co-constructed, created as an interplay between the individual and the structures – of race, ethnicity, religion, national context and so on – in which she finds herself.

Real-life examples like those of Patel, Braverman and Sunak can help diaspora scholars like myself sharpen our analysis of diasporic communities. As scholars, we cannot presume to know how members of diasporas will identify themselves and what their politics will be without doing extensive research. This will build a better understanding of the complex ways that diasporic communities will contribute to society in their new homes.

All we can say for sure is that diasporic identities and identifications are fluid, mobile and creative. Diasporic people cannot be pigeon-holed or put in a box.

Melissa Tandiwe Myambo, Research Associate, Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.