A new cabinet minister for immigration may be urgently needed given Ireland's status as a leading destination for foreign workers, an expert warned tonight.
Around 100,000 non-EU workers who have come to Ireland in the past five years and foreign-born nationals account for nearly 10 per cent of the population.
Migration expert Dr Demetrios Papademetriou said this made Ireland top ofthe league of international migration. "Ireland is no longer a tit-bit player. To give you an example, in the US, only 12 per cent of people are foreign-born," he said.
He said one of the options open to the Government was to appoint a dedicated Minister for Immigration, in line with the approach taken by Canada, Australia and the Netherlands.
"It's one of those issues that cuts across competence - education, employment and health. If the current rate of immigration growth continues, you may need to consider, sooner or later, creating a ministry," he said.
Dr Papademetriou, who is the head of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, said the other Government response to immigration was to set up task forces.
"That's too ad-hoc-ish. We need everyday attention to the issue." Dr Papademetriou, who emigrated from Greece to the USA in 1964 at the age of 18, was speaking in advance of a public seminar organised by the Immigrant Council of Ireland.
He said the top priorities for dealing with immigration had to be the entry of legal immigrants, the review of internal controls to prevent any anti-immigrant feeling and the integration of new migrants.
Dr Papademetriou said it was wrong to believe that many Irish immigrants were only working temporarily in the country and would leave at the first sight of an economic downturn. "A proportion of people who come here will stay and stay permanently. They become like the Irish. That number will keep increasing and you'll have to invest a lot of energy in how to incorporate them to gain more."
He said the Government still had time to create a positive society, where new immigrants were fully integrated in work and education. But he warned that the negative vision was one where immigrants were simply treated as work units.
"Through our actions, we invite them to look inward and become isolated. Then we wake up in ten years time and say `We picked out the wrong immigrants'. It is better to get it right early on."