A study of asylum-seekers shows that 44 per cent of a representative sample come from professional backgrounds; 28 per cent from other non-manual or skilled manual backgrounds and only 2 per cent are unskilled.
The study, carried out by a group of public health doctors and psychologists under the auspices of the department of public health medicine at UCD, involved the detailed questioning of 43 asylum-seekers in Ennis, Dublin, Kildare and Wicklow. It is due to be published before Christmas.
The study concentrated on people from five of the six countries which were the source of most asylum-seekers in the six months between October 1997 and March 1998 - Algeria, Angola, Nigeria, Somalia and Congo (formerly Zaire).
Noting the absence of any accurate national statistics on asylum-seekers, one of its authors, Father Michael Begley, stressed his group's research into their health and other needs was exploratory.
This morning the director of the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, Father Bill Toner, will cite these findings when he calls on the Government to introduce a new immigration scheme to allow non-EU nationals fleeing "dreadful" economic conditions to live and work in Ireland under the same conditions as EU nationals.
Father Toner said yesterday "such immigrants would have to show they have a good hope of being able to support themselves within a reasonable time". He estimated such a policy would allow about 4,000 non-EU immigrants to enter the State every year. At the same time, the policy of "scrupulous adherence" to the Geneva Convention for allowing in refugees should be maintained. "The ungenerous Irish policy on immigration from non-EU countries is based on the mistaken fear that they will take jobs away from Irish people, particularly at the bottom end of the market." Father Toner noted the ESRI's estimate of a need for an additional 285,000 employees in Ireland between 1995 and 2003, employers' complaints about the lack of skilled people within Ireland and the study's evidence that a large proportion of asylum-seekers were highly skilled.