Search

In 2014 residents in Direct Provision Centres for asylum seekers staged a series of protests. The protests, which coincided with the appointment of a new Minister for Justice who announced the Irish government’s plans to reform the asylum system, voiced three clear demands. Firstly, the protestors demanded that all asylum centres be closed; secondly, they demanded that all residents be given the right to remain and work in Ireland; and thirdly, they demanded an end to all deportations. The government’s response to these protests was to appoint a working group in October 2014, made up of representatives of migrant-support NGOs (but without any significant representation of asylum seekers themselves) while also announcing that it intends to reform rather than abolish the system. Against this background, this paper makes three interlinked theoretical propositions. Firstly, I propose that just as the Irish state and society managed to ignore workhouses, mental health asylums, “mother and baby homes”, Magdalene laundries and industrial schools, they also “manage not to know” of the plight of asylum seekers, precisely because the Direct Provision system isolates asylum applicants, makes them dependent on bed and board and a small “residual income maintenance payment to cover personal requisites”, and makes it difficult for them to organise on a national level. “Managing not to know”, or disavowing, entails the erasure of the Direct Provision system from Ireland’s collective consciousness at a time when increasing emigration is returning to haunt Irish society after years of refusing to confront the pain of emigration. I argue that asylum seekers represent the return of Ireland’s repressed that confronts Irish people, themselves e/migrants par excellence. Secondly, I propose that by taking action and representing themselves, the residents of Direct Provision Centres can no longer be theorised as Agamben’s “bare life”, at the mercy of sovereign power, to whom everything is done and who are therefore not considered active agents in their own right. The third proposition responds to the theme of this special issue, that multiculturalism is “in crisis”, arguing in the conclusion that this “crisis” hardly applies to Ireland, where the brief flirtations with “interculturalism” by state, society but also Irish studies disavow race and racism in favour of a returning obsession with emigration, which enables the continued disavowal of the experiences of asylum seekers in Direct Provision. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article critiques policies of deportation and deportability – a technology emanating from three seemingly conflicting rationalities: states' obligations under international human rights regimes, capitalism's need to facilitate the movement of labour, and the need to reaffirm state sovereignty. After outlining the concept of deportability, we argue that although justified by state actors as an integral part of asylum and immigration policies, deportability epitomizes the paradox of immigration regimes at a point of crisis. We use Israel and Ireland as case studies to illustrate that migrant deportability circumvents human rights and domestic legislation that hinder the power of the state to deport unwanted migrants. Paradoxically, in both, policies that engender the deportability of asylum seekers are a response to their undeportability. Despite their differences, Israel and Ireland are unusual immigration destinations and quintessential diaspora nations, whose histories of dispersal configure Jewishness and Irishness in ethno-racially rigid yet spatially fluid terms, as illustrated by their citizenship regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article outlines the ease with which the Republic of Ireland had moved from publicly articulating Irish racism during the 1997 European Year Against Racism, to employing euphemisms such as interculturalism, transculturalism, integration and cultural diversity. In the rush to diversity, these euphemisms, employed unproblematically during the Irish economic boom, erase political terms such as ‘race’ and racism that state actors do not want to hear mentioned. Using examples of the racialization of specific populations, this article argues that the economic downturn led to the disappearance of integrationist discourses, as ‘race’, racism and immigration become but vague memories. Against the background of shadowy figures of turbaned and veiled migrants as the racialized trope of Irish ‘racism without racism’, the article argues that through the strategy of convening migrant-led associations and networks, migrants, though forced to appropriate state parlance, enact their own ‘integration from below’, making integration work in new exciting ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synopsis: This article has two aims. Positing Ireland as a ‘racial state,’ it positions migrant women, who have been represented as conniving to subvert Ireland''s citizenship and nationality norms, as carrying the burden of representations of strangerhood, theorised after Zygmunt Bauman and Walter Benjamin as both flâneur, or stroller, and stranger proper. My second aim is to consider the collusion by feminist researchers in such representations through our power to name, categorise, and constitute migrants as ‘other,’ and thus as the unproblematised objects of our orientalising gaze. Like city strollers, finding themselves among strangers and being strangers to them, social researchers often take strangers as ‘surfaces,’ seeing and knowing them episodically. However, this article is neither a feminist j’accuse nor a prescriptive solution to the ‘problem’ of researching migrant women. In this article, I do not assume ‘migrant women’ as a homogenising monolithic category. Rather than attempting to make their experiences visible through unreflexive conventional ethnographies, this article seeks to reproblematise representation and experience as feminist methodological tools used here to position the migrant–woman–stranger within a gendered critique of the racial state. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]