Migration and the reinvention of Ireland: Many migrants have become undocumented for reasons beyond their control, such as workplace exploitation, Ruadhán MacCormaicreports in his continuing series
For four years, Sylvia has been struck by the same fear every time she hears a rap on the door, certain each time that they have tracked her down. "You feel like you're a ghost," she says quietly. "You have to watch where you go. Every day you just say 'thank you God I'm still here'. It's every day, every minute. You get very emotional all the time, because if you hear a knock on the door, you think the Garda is coming."
Sylvia (not her real name) came to Ireland in 1999 with a work permit and the certainty of a job as a housekeeper in Dublin.
A single mother from southern Africa, she had been working as a secretary in a legal firm at home but decided to leave with her only son at a time when her country's economy was shaping up for a free-fall and she could scarcely muster the funds to pay for the boy's education.
After six months here she became a shop manager with a catering company. At first, she was pleased with the job and the relative liberty her wages conferred.
But soon she realised that others in her position were much better off. She was paid the minimum wage but worked from 7.30am to 7pm six days a week. She was refused holidays and couldn't leave the premises for lunch because her employer said she had nobody to cover. The manager's title was meaningless.
"If there were management meetings, I never went to one of them," she says.
"The people that I worked with, they were very racially abusive as well. I worked with my auntie there and the first comment they passed to me was like, 'Do monkeys know how to read and add?' Those sorts of things. You'd complain to the boss and the boss would say, 'Well that's how workplaces are'. Every time you made a complaint, it was, 'You know your work permit is coming up for renewal'. "
Angered by her treatment, Sylvia eventually decided to join a trade union, whose local representative wrote to her employer seeking a meeting. She refused and took umbrage that Sylvia had involved the union.
"Eventually, they said to me, I can either resign or be fired, because of all the problems they said I caused by reporting them to the union."
Four years have passed since Sylvia was forced to leave her job and thus became undocumented through no fault of her own. Though she arrived here legally, paid taxes for three years and later won a case against her employer at the Equality Tribunal, she has no legal right to remain in the country and could be issued with deportation proceedings at any time.
Sylvia is smart, articulate and warm, but describing her daily life "on the run" is an ordeal in itself. "It's horrible, absolutely horrible. You live like a thief. I've got a son, he has just finished school. When he goes out, he has to call me and tell me: 'Mam, I'm here.' 'Mam, I'm on my way home.' It's horrible. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy," she says, dabbing her eyes with a tissue.
Sylvia's voice trails off, her words drowned out by the sound of a squad car's siren coming from the city street below.
"You feel you want to work but you don't have the right to do it. You've got to rely on people for money. You live like a beggar. My family are good to me, but when you've been working all your life and supporting yourself, it takes a strain."
There is scant knowledge about the numbers of undocumented migrants in Ireland. Trade unions think there are tens of thousands, and although the Government doesn't provide an estimate, an official from the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment claimed in June 2005 that up to 50,000 undocumented migrants could be working in the State.
They become undocumented for a variety of reasons. Some enter as tourists and stay in the country. Others are trafficked here or remain after having their applications for asylum rejected. But advocacy groups working in the area believe there are a significant number who, like Sylvia, arrived here from a non-EU country with a work permit but fell out of the system for reasons beyond their control. Of them, some are let go by their employers, but more often they have left because of workplace exploitation.
The Migrant Rights Centre Ireland (MRCI), a support group, says that of 1,000 migrants who entered the country legally and sought its help between July 2005 and January 2007, one-quarter had become undocumented. More than 60 per cent of this group had been exploited in the workplace.
This was the situation Iryna Zmyeyevska found herself in when she had to leave the mushroom farm near Mullingar where she worked with six Ukrainian compatriots until 2003.
As a state treasury accountant in Ukraine, Iryna earned about €80 a month and routinely had to wait two or three months to be paid.
When an employment agent from Ireland dangled a work permit before her and said she could earn seven times more on a mushroom farm - thus covering the costs of her children's education and her elderly parents' care - she felt there was no decision to make.
Iryna lasted a year on the farm, working in wearying conditions for up to 13 hours a day for an employer who paid not per hour but per kilo of mushrooms. After a time her health began to suffer. She suffered from violent coughs (brought on by the chemicals that were sprayed in the tunnels, she thinks) and her hands were in constant pain.
After leaving the farm, Iryna worked in Dublin's unofficial economy for 2½ years, taking low-paid jobs in restaurants and takeaways, pocketing just enough for her rent and sustenance and sending the rest home to her family in Ukraine.
"You're working on the black market, so you don't even know how much your boss is going to pay you. One said to me: I will pay you €7. When I got my payment it was €6 per hour. When I asked him about it, he did not tell me anything. You have no power. You can take the money or you can leave and try to find another one."
During those years, Iryna recalls, her life became a ritual played out to the tune of the one overriding emotion that consumes everyone in her position: fear. She froze every time a landlord asked for her passport. She crossed the street every time she spotted a garda. She had medicine shipped to her from Ukraine because she thought she had no right to see a doctor here.
"If something happens to you - to your health or to your family - what are you going to do? You are always in depression . . . It's so hard to live with such fear, I cannot explain it."
Eventually Iryna found a job as a housekeeper for a family in the city. Her employer offered to do all he could to secure a work permit. She then approached the MRCI (after having first circled the building a few times, deliberating on whether they could be trusted with her story) and they put together a dossier on her case for the Department of Justice. She finally received her papers last February and now works as a child-minder for the family.
In helping Iryna out of her legal void, the MRCI made use of an ad-hoc arrangement that the Department of Justice has been operating for years, whereby it considers individual cases if a dossier is submitted by a migrant who has become innocently undocumented.
But the system is confusing and little understood. Nobody knows what makes for a successful application because there are no criteria available from the department, and for those whose applications fail there is no right of appeal. Because the undocumented are loath to alert the authorities to their presence - especially their address - those who might know the scheme exists are likely to be put off by its risky opacity.
"It's not good enough that it just happens that we know that this is the situation," says Jacqueline Healy, MRCI's acting director. "There are many people out there who don't know that we can refer cases and we can negotiate on their behalf. So they end up staying in the shadows and not ever coming out, and these are people who are in an extremely vulnerable situation."
The MRCI wants the informal procedure to become a general policy that is communicated to both migrant workers and their employers. A "bridging visa" would allow a migrant worker to change or seek employment within a defined period, and cases would be decided in accordance with clearly defined criteria.
The Department of Justice, however, is not keen to make a policy of the practice. A spokesman said it believes these cases "can best be dealt with on a case by case basis and on the merits of each particular case".
Sylvia, weary and exasperated after four years without papers, still hopes that an end to her ordeal is in sight. She has found an employer willing to vouch for her and has asked the department to look sympathetically at her case, although she knows she has taken a chance by bringing herself to their attention.
For now, the fog of uncertainty lingers over everything she does. Her son wants to take a course in carpentry but is afraid that it might lead the authorities back to his mother.
Her health has worsened in the past few years and she feels guilty at having to ask her sister for the cost of her medication.
"I feel that I was put in this situation - if it was my own fault, maybe I wouldn't care. But I came here, I gave up home. You sell up all your things, because to get a ticket to come over, it's expensive. You change your son's life. Even if I had to go home now, what do I go home to?"