Immigrants Are Putting a Strain on ‘Ireland of the Welcomes’

John Tambwe stands before the class of teenagers and braces for the insults.

Rapist. Liar. Sponger. Thief. Waster.

The 32-year-old refugee doesn’t flinch. In 15 months in Ireland he has grown accustomed to the slurs. The innocence of ignorance, he says. After all, most of the students asked for their first impressions of him have never met a black man before.

Slowly, Tambwe starts telling his story: How he fled the genocide in Rwanda with his wife and baby after friends and family were massacred, how they paid a trafficker to smuggle them out of Congo, how they left their house, their belongings, the land they loved, to travel to this cold, wind-swept outpost of Europe, a place they knew nothing about except that it had green fields and whiskey and bombs in Belfast.

“At first,” Tambwe said, “I worried that we were going from one war zone to another.”

He has learned that he is safe from bombs in Dublin. But not from cries of “Jungle-boy, go back to your own country.” Not from graffiti that says, “Whites only” and landlords that say, “No blacks.” Not from buses that pass him by, nor from police who stop him on O’Connell Street just because of the color of his face.

At the end of his story, Tambwe asks students to write their impressions again. Some have tears in their eyes as they offer their verdict.

Strong. Brave. Courageous. Good. Kind.

If only he could speak to every school in Ireland, Tambwe sighs, then maybe he could stop this terrible disease from taking root.

“Ireland could be a model for the world,” he says. “It could show the world that ignorance and prejudice have no place in society, that racism can be wiped out before it has a chance to destroy.”

It’s a powerful thought, and Tambwe isn’t the only one expressing it these days. Ireland, long accustomed to raising sons and daughters for export, has suddenly been discovered by the sons and daughters of other nations. And the land that prides itself on Cead Mile Failte--Irish for a hundred thousand welcomes--is wrestling with the question of who exactly is welcome on its shores.

From Romania and Nigeria and Rwanda they come, cramped into sealed containers on ferries from Europe, hidden in the undercarriages of trucks trundling over the Northern Ireland border, clutching false papers at Dublin airport. Thirteen thousand immigrants have flocked to Ireland in the last two years, and thousands more are arriving every month. The numbers seem staggering in a country of 3.5 million which had only a trickle of immigrants before 1996.

But the cultural and psychological impact is even more staggering. Romanian Gypsies in colorful scarves beg on O’Connell Street bridge, a homeless Iraqi sells newspapers near the Tara Street train station, an African center has opened on Meath Street, a Bosnian center on Pearse Street, a mosque in Clonskeagh.

The pace of change seems frantic to many, frightening to some.

“There is a certain culture of disbelief that is leading to a certain hysteria,” says Catherine Kenny of the nonprofit Irish Refugee Council. “People must remember that immigrants are coming here for the same reasons the Irish went to London and New York. They are coming for a better life.”

Many find it. Ireland has one of the most generous social welfare systems in Europe, and anyone who applies for asylum as a refugee is entitled to benefits as soon as he or she arrives. Refugees are not detained or imprisoned as they are in many other countries, including the United States. Instead, asylum seekers are assured emergency shelter and free medical care. The booming economy--the much-heralded “Celtic Tiger”--means plenty of low-paying jobs.

“We were told we would be safe. We were told we would not be turned away,” sobbed Emily Marc, a 27-year-old Romanian who survived three days in a sealed container with her husband, Adrian, having paid $2,000 to a trafficker to smuggle them out of the country. Trucked across Europe, they were put on a ferry bound for Ireland and eventually dumped in Dublin in the middle of the night. They had $50 between them. They weren’t even sure what country they were in.

“When you leave something horrible, you don’t choose where you are going,” Emily whispered in broken English, describing how, after the couple had lost clerical jobs, they could barely afford to buy food. “We left something horrible,” she said. “But there are things that are horrible here too.”

It’s not just the sneers at their accents as they tramp around Dublin looking for cheap housing, nor the cries of “spongers” when they collect social welfare. What hurts the most is the hostility they feel in this land that has always prided itself on friendliness, on its reputation as one of the most charitable nations on earth.

“You just keep quiet when you hear people say, ‘Bloody Romanians, why don’t you go back to your own country,’ ” says Sorin Costica, a 33-year-old taxi driver from Romania, who also keeps quiet about the stones thrown at his house. “You realize that it’s just ignorance and fear.”

Costica feels luckier than most. He speaks English. He has an Irish-born son, which means he is entitled to stay. He earns enough to send money back to his parents. And he has white skin.

For although prejudice flows freely against immigrants from all nations, blacks bear the brunt: a 17-year-old Congolese youth brutally beaten in an unprovoked attack, security guards accused of roughing up Nigerians in a downtown shopping center, a Congolese engineer charged with assaulting police officers after a raid on his house--apparently a case of false identity. These are just some recent cases that have been documented. On the streets, the evidence is everywhere, from crude graffiti to deeply offensive insults casually tossed at blacks.

Things got to the point where they could no longer be ignored. In January, the government began a $1.2-million campaign to fight racism, the first of its kind in Irish history. Announcing the grant, officials referred to extreme racist attitudes in Austria and France. Action must be taken, they said, to prevent the same problems in Ireland.

But what kind of action? How can a nation that has always given so generously to faraway victims of famine and war learn to accept the victims who wash up on its shores?

“The Irish used to give pennies for the black babies,” says Kensika Monshengwo, referring to the collection boxes for Africa that once sat in Irish classrooms. “Now the black babies have grown up and come here. Would it be better if they had died?”

Monshengwo smiles. He knows the discomfort people feel when he pricks their conscience with his words, knows one way to fight racism is to keep on pricking. Like others involved in organizations that have sprung up to help immigrants, the 33-year-old refugee thinks Ireland is at a critical juncture in history.

So he runs English classes for new immigrants, and he runs anti-racism sessions for government workers, including the police.

“Nobody chooses to be a refugee,” says Monshengwo, a diplomat’s son who fled Congo after being imprisoned for involvement with civil rights groups in 1997. “You don’t pay someone $5,000 to smuggle you out of your own country so that you can come here and live on 72 pounds [$90] a week in a ghetto.”

To fight racism, Monshengwo says, you have to put other people in your shoes, have to show them that their dreams and despairs are the same as yours.

In training sessions, Monshengwo describes an imaginary coup in Dublin. He tells participants they have to flee the country and gives them five minutes to scribble down a handful of items to take. He describes days of traveling, bribing, growing despair. Turned away by France, which has recognized the new regime, they make their way to Congo where they are met by skeptical government workers, inured to endless tales of woe.

Why did you choose to come here, Monshengwo barks, pretending to be an official and speaking in his native Lingala.

We didn’t choose it, they plead through an interpreter. We were fleeing persecution.

“Where are your papers?”

“We didn’t have time to get proper papers.”

“Why didn’t you apply for asylum in France?”

Monshengwo has a powerful presence and plays his role with conviction. By the end of the session, some trainees are lying about being tortured, begging to remain, crying when told they will be deported.

The scene plays out in reality at the Justice Department application center in Dublin, a nondescript building where a mass of humanity gathers every morning, waiting to see if what they have heard about Ireland is true.

“I want to apply for asylum as a refugee.”

The requests come in every language, from people fleeing all sorts of pain. Under Irish law, anyone who can demonstrate a “well-founded fear of being persecuted” is entitled to refugee status and the same rights as an Irish citizen. Though it is clear that many are fleeing economic hardship, not persecution, all are permitted to remain while their cases are being processed. The huge backlog of cases means it can take up to two years for one to be decided. And, until recently, no one could be sent home because Ireland’s deportation laws were ruled unconstitutional.

Officials acknowledge that the system, based on outdated laws, is unworkable. Some propose denying entry to so-called “economic migrants” and legalizing deportations. Other proposals include housing asylum seekers in centers, issuing vouchers for food and clothing, and fingerprinting those over the age of 14.

The proposals, borrowed from other European countries, have met with an outcry from anti-racist organizations.

“If Irish emigrants to America had been treated the same way, Irish politicians would have been beating a path to the White House,” said Donncha O’Connell of the Irish Civil Liberties Council.

But Justice Department spokeswoman Bernice O’Neill argues that every country has a right to impose restrictions on asylum seekers, particularly when each one costs the state about $12,500 a year. Referring to European agreements that require refugees to seek asylum in the first safe country they enter, O’Neill said, “People shouldn’t be traveling all across the continent of Europe to apply for asylum here.”

While the debate rages, newcomers keep arriving.

In the first week of this year, 250 people applied for asylum, including a group of Romanians who hoodwinked officials by pretending to be a church choir en route to a Christmas concert in Sligo. The concert was canceled when organizers discovered that the real choir was still singing away in Romania.

“I’m not racist, but 90% of them don’t belong here,” says 52-year-old Shay Lowry as he drives his taxi through a poor section of Dublin. “When the Irish went to Ellis Island, there was no one standing there with a $100 check and a medical card.”

Lowry echoes the calls to talk-radio shows and the speeches of some politicians when he talks about abuses of the system, the easy availability of false ID cards on the black market, the suggestion that many immigrants are having babies just to stay in Ireland.

“Irish people are sleeping rough in the streets,” he says. “Let’s look after our own first.”

It’s a cry heard all over Ireland, but mainly in the poorer sections of Dublin, where the gap between rich and poor is most evident, and where most of the immigrants initially settle.

And it’s a cry that is getting increasingly organized.

“The fundamental problem is that once asylum seekers set foot on your territory only a very small minority will ever leave again,” states the Immigration Control Platform, an organization founded by Cork schoolteacher Aine Ni Chonaill. The organization, denounced as racist by many, urges Ireland to do everything in its power to make the country less attractive to immigrants. Ni Chonaill declined to be interviewed.

Ni Chonaill’s group reserves particular scorn for people like Peter Finlay, a Dublin lawyer who until recently was a member of the appeals authority that decides the cases of immigrants whose applications are denied. Finlay resigned in January, saying he could no longer be part of a system he didn’t believe in.

Piled high on his desk are the files of some 400 cases he reviewed in the last two years: a Somali couple who had been raped, a 13-year-old boy who fled from Kosovo to Dublin hidden on a truck after seeing both parents killed, a Congolese man with a bullet hole through his chest.

Finlay winces as he recounts their stories and his own agony in deciding their fate. One solution to Ireland’s dilemma, he says, is to grant amnesty to the 10,000 or so immigrants waiting for their cases to be resolved. In the meantime, he says, a fair, thoughtful approach to immigration should be drafted, rather than the “knee-jerk police-state reaction” that has fostered racist tendencies elsewhere in Europe.

“Ireland has a historic opportunity to decide to flourish as a multicultural society,” Finlay says, “instead of becoming a small-minded, begrudging, suspicious people.”

Across the city, the same message is chanted by the Anti-Racism Campaign, a ragtag group of Dubliners who spend Saturdays distributing literature near Trinity College.

“Down with state racism!” “No deportations!” they chant, as they hand pamphlets to passersby.

Many fear mass deportations once the new immigration policies are in place. The group has lobbied airline workers to refuse to take deportees. It is also active in several court cases involving immigrants who claim to have been harassed by police.

Larry Deery, a 38-year-old construction worker, stops to sign their petition and discuss their campaign.

“Ireland has always been racist. We just never had a chance to vent it,” says Deery, who spent eight years working illegally in New York before the Celtic Tiger lured him home. “It’s just a basic human fear when you see people from another race.”

“I admire what you are trying to do, but I don’t think you will change things,” he tells the group.

“We have to believe,” insists campaigner Rosanna Flynn. Ireland, she says, is small enough that everyone has a chance to meet a refugee, to get to know a Nigerian or a Rwandan, to hear firsthand the stories of a Romanian or a Bosnian.

Braced against the wind and the rain, clutching her leaflets, chanting her chant, Flynn is the epitome of this belief: that a tiny emigrant nation can be a model for change, that it can show the world how prejudices can be quashed and minds opened, how racism can be eradicated before it has a chance to flourish.