Douglas Gageby Fellowship:Migrants enrich us in many ways at little cost in racial tension but we need a guiding vision to see and treat them as part of society, not just as workers, Ruadhán Mac Cormaicreports.
On the veranda of his modernist cube in a quiet, residential part of Anápolis city, the Brazilian listens to his own story, soaking up the comic, marvelling at every turn.
A lime-green parakeet chirps in its cage and a soft hiss rises from the lawn where the gardener is dousing the sun-singed palms. Outside, even the cars seem slowed by the heat.
His name is Bill O'Dwyer, great-grandson of an Irishman who came here to work in the lumber business at the turn of the last century. He settled in Goiás, in central Brazil, and never returned home.
Bill hasn't yet seen Ireland, but he is the country's honorary consul here and the coat of arms is a prized adornment in a house coming down with antiques and artwork.
These days, from his desk at the Mercedes dealership on the city's main boulevard, O'Dwyer takes pride in how the local economy - booming louder with every week - is being fed by a link that has made Ireland the destination of choice for the city's aspirant young.
"Once the dream was to go to the United States, but now they go to Ireland, and they can buy houses, they can buy cars," he says. "For many families, it was a gift from God. Now they have better life conditions: they're eating better, they're living better."
Listening to O'Dwyer brings a few things home, but above all how the magnitude of the historical reversal that has made Ireland one of the rich world's magnet-states is such that sometimes it can best be appreciated from afar.
Vila Fabril, the Anápolis district where the dilapidated shacks are now outnumbered by new two-storey homes and cars bought with wages from the factories of Clonee and Naas, provides some of the simplest, most striking illustrations of Ireland's position in the globalised world.
This country's experience is global in another sense too. Last month I told someone I was writing a series on migration. "Are you interested in birds?" he asked.
The truth is that, like him, most of us still think of the movement of people across borders as immigration, not migration. But Ireland's rehearsal of the immigration debate is being played out on the fringes of a larger, planetary drama that is, in the words of the UN's former special representative for migration, Peter Sutherland, "the key international question for this century".
Across the rich world, where migrants account for a large and rising share of the population, governments and citizens are grappling with the same questions that preoccupy Ireland: who to admit and how to incorporate them into society? Given that a country that was until recently seen as a serial exporter of youth has in less than two decades reached a position where it is admitting more immigrants per head than most other countries in the world, so far it has been a relatively smooth revolution.
An ever swelling economy finds jobs for most who want them, and there has been mutual gain in the government's decision in 2004 to open the labour market to those from eastern and central Europe. The exchange makes Ireland better off as well as the migrants, many of whom take the jobs that Irish people spurn.
The social space has become deeper and wider with the introduction of new languages, cultures, religions and experiences, and in general the price to be paid in racial tension has been low. Though there are pockets of loudly-expressed resentment towards immigrants, there is little evidence of widespread antipathy, and election results show consistently that overtly anti-immigrant politics meet little success.
Many institutions have responded briskly to the new demands: the Garda Síochána, for instance, has made it easier for immigrants to join and has invested time and money in anti-racism projects and links with new communities.
But the real challenges remain. The recent appointment of a Minister of State for Integration points to a shift in focus from admission to incorporation, but as a report published by the Immigrant Council earlier this month suggests, the Minister faces a daunting in-tray.
There is no lead agency responsible for migration policy and co-ordination of migration-related activities in Ireland, it pointed out. And "this is exacerbated by a general lack of vision or strategy in migration and integration policy. The lack of consistency has led to the piecemeal development of policy and legislation."
This lack of a guiding vision is the master-theme for those working in the area. It explains the dearth of data on Ireland's immigrants as well as a plethora of problems that would not have arisen had government been thinking strategically about integration long before now. Problems in the country's classrooms - where the State has been strangely slow to appreciate the difficulties posed by the influx of large groups of non-English speakers - reflect a wider pattern. Across the State apparatus, the lack of standards in language and interpreting obstructs even the most basic communication between its institutions and many of those they serve.
Minority ethnic voices, in fact, are virtually unheard in many spheres of public life, from the arts and media to politics and the law. When the 30th Dáil convened for the first time recently, there was among the 166 TDs not one member of an immigrant or ethnic minority community that numbers over 10 per cent of the population. Political parties are among the most monocultural groups in society.
If there are signs that State services are not keeping pace with demographic changes, there are also indications that the mental leap that will be required to fully absorb immigrants has yet to take place.
The general tendency of politicians, for instance, is to speak of immigrants exclusively as members of the workforce, not of society, as though migrants were only actors in the global job market and not prospective members of the community.
In effect, the public is asked a variation on the question once posed by JK Galbraith: considering how migration so manifestly made all parties better off, he asked, what "perversity of the human soul" would cause people to resist so obvious a good? If only it were that simple.
The reluctance to talk about the social and cultural shifts has two significant effects. First, while allowing myth and prejudice to circulate freely, it absolves people of the need to think about the deeper ramifications of these changes. What does migration mean for our notions of citizenship, of the welfare state and reciprocity, of culture, of nationhood? Or do we not trust ourselves to talk about it?
Speaking privately last month, a senior politician who is an enthusiastic public advocate of immigration hesitated when the conversation turned to cultural give-and-take. "Anyone who feels passionately Irish, whether you like to admit it or not, you do feel an element of challenge about all of this," said the politician.
Second, the silence obstructs the integration process itself by relegating newcomers ("non-nationals") to the role of economic automatons with no stake or future in society. One impression that has returned to me over the past four months is that huge numbers of immigrants are fully-fledged members of the economy but have no place in society, living their lives in parallel to (and unheeded by) the rest of the community.
Piotr from eastern Poland has been living in Dublin for almost two years. He works as a security guard at an office complex in the IFSC six nights a week, he told me. He sleeps in a hostel (where he shares a room with two strangers) for most of the day, then strolls around the city for a few hours in order to kill some time before work. He has no friends in Dublin and the farthest he has travelled from the city is Howth.
Asylum seekers, many of whom are forced to wait for years while their applications for leave to remain are processed, are consigned to poverty and effectively kept at a remove from the rest of the community by a ban on paid work and a punitive allowance of €19.10 a week.
If immigrants such as these are to be integrated, says Dr Jean-Pierre Eyanga Ekumeloko of Integrating Ireland, it will require reciprocal negotiation on the part of native and newcomer. There are practical challenges - how to make sure that immigrants can access services and compete for jobs on an equal footing, for example - but there are more searching questions too.
If what emerges will amount to a redefinition of society, as Ekumeloko puts it, then the greatest leap will be essentially an act of imagination, requiring us to reinvent the mental framework through which we view such ideas as identity, citizenship, sovereignty and belonging.
The question is: are we ready? In one sense, Ireland should be better placed than others. The country has in ways been multicultural for centuries, and long experience of emigration has given Irishness a malleable, open quality. As Declan Kiberd points out, the recognition during Mary Robinson's presidency that the overseas Irish were also part of the national family suggested a corollary: that many immigrant peoples living on the island of Ireland might also have their own global communities over and above the immediate society to which they belong.
And in 1998, 94 per cent of the Republic's electorate endorsed the idea of hybridity when they voted for the Belfast Agreement.
Speaking recently to Zeljka Doljanin, a Croatian woman writing her PhD on the stranger in current Irish fiction, I was struck by her view that in reading John McGahern and Brian Friel she found a more fully-formed sense of belonging and self-assurance than she sensed among those reaching maturity today. With self-confidence came a greater curiosity and openness to the outsider, she said, reminding me of a point made very often by recent immigrants: how Irish people seem to lack a clear sense of themselves and their own culture.
As Ekumeloko puts it, "the question you have to ask is, what are we integrating into?"
The paradox is this: if ambivalence towards the outsider is an extension of ambivalence towards ourselves, then not until we can explain what it is that makes us Irish will we be capable of dealing confidently with those who are sure of what sets them apart.
Series concluded.
Ruadhán Mac Cormaic was the winner of the 2007 Douglas Gageby Fellowship. His series, which concludes here today, is available in its entirety at www.ireland.com/focus/gageby.
The award to a journalist at the beginning of their career, and sponsored by theIrish Times Trust, is named in honour of the former editor ofThe Irish Times . Advertisements for applications for the 2008 fellowship will appear in September.