I said we should compare the Irish immigration policy to the American one to see which was more generous. She flew into a rage, and said she would not "insult" the Irish government by "googling around" to get numbers to compare the two countries. Nevertheless, I figured I would look at some of the data to try to understand the situation:
Foreign born are working in Each Country:
The foreign-born portion of the US workforce is 11.7% from the US Census data:
http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/p20-551.pdf
The foreign-born porition of the Irish workforce is only 8% :
http://www.workpermit.com/news/2006_04_04/uk/immigrants_to_ireland_continue.htm
So the US currently appears to be far more open to foreign-born workers than Ireland.
Skill Requirements for Immigration:
It turns out that Ireland has no humanitarian immigration categories at all, and has a big list of skills that are ineligible to immigrate to Ireland:
http://www.workpermit.com/ireland/ineligible_job_categories.htm
Ireland only allows those with needed skills to immigrate to Ireland, and has a severely restrictive immigration policy:
http://www.workpermit.com/ireland/ireland.htm
Current Yearly Immigration:
The US is currently admitting over 1.2 million immigrants per year:
http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=53
or about 0.4% per year. In addition, the US is the destination of 400,000-700,000 illegal immigrants per year, or about 0.13% -0.23%. This gives the US a total of legal and illegal immigration of 0.53%-0.63% per year.
Ireland is admitting about 40,000 immigrants per year:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/world/europe/19ireland.html?_r=1&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/I/Immigration%20and%20Refugees&oref=slogin
or about 0.95% per year.
Ireland started cracking down on illegal immigrants in 2002:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CE2DE1239F934A25754C0A9649C8B63
Racial Mix: How many nonEuropeans?
Ireland has currently about 88,500 non-EU-15 residents:
http://migrationinformation.net/Feature/print.cfm?ID=260
constituting about 2% of the population.
The US is far more diverse, with
European American 58.8% (nonHispanic)
Hispanic American 14.5%
Black American 12.1%
Asian American 4.3%
American Indian 0.8%
Hawaiian and Pacific Islander 0.1%
Other Races 6%
Mixed Race 1.9%
Jewish Americans 2.5%
Arab Americans 1.3%
Iranian Americans 0.1-0.2%
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Racial_groups (and related pages).
It is incredible that someone from a country that is 98% European is criticizing someone from a country that is 59% European of being racist or not admitting enough nonEuropeans as immigrants. I mean really, find something else to complain about...
Refugee Programs:
Between January 1995 and June 2004, Ireland officially recognized 6,304 persons as refugees, correspondinng to about 630 refugees per year. Irish asylum seekers cannot work unless they are officially recognized as refugees, and Ireland only recognizes a tiny fraction of the 5000-10,000 yearly asylum seekers as refugees:
http://migrationinformation.net/Feature/print.cfm?ID=260 This refugee flow, which was the peak of the Irish program, corresponds to about 0.015% of the current population.
However, Ireland abandoned the jus solis principle, which said that children born to immigrants in Ireland were Irish citizens, as holds in most other countries, including the US. Prior to January 2003, about 11,000 children of foreign born people a year applied for Irish residency under jus solis. In January 2003, the Irish Supreme Court ruled that these children did not have an automatic right to residency, and each situation had to be considered individually, taking into account "general requirements of the common good." A June 2004 public referendum confirmed this principle, with 79% of the public agreeing that those children born in Ireland to nonIrish should not be granted citizenship automatically. This caused a large drop-off in the number of people seeking asylum in Ireland.
Throughout the early 1990s, the US admitted 115,000 per year under refugee programs: http://www.migrationinformation.org/USfocus/display.cfm?id=229 In the latter 1990s, the US admitted 76,000 per year seeking asylum under refugee programs. After 9/11 this dropped to 28,000 per year:
http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/36495.pdf
In 2003, President Bush announced a commitment to increase this back to at least 70,000 per year:
http://www.lirs.org/News/PresDesk/RD200312.htm and in 2004 the number admitted rebounded to 53,000: http://hias.org/advocacy/Docs/refFY_05_2005.php
and was also 54,000 in 2005:
http://www.state.gov/g/prm/rls/65215.htm and 41,000 in 2006 through September 30, 2006: http://www.state.gov/g/prm/refadm/rls/85970.htm
Over the 30 years ending on September 2006, the US admitted an average of 90,000 refugees per year. For most of this period, the US admitted more refugees than the rest of the world combined, and has always been the largest recipient of refugees. This corresponds to a yearly total of about 0.03% of the present US population.
It should be noted that a separate set of asylum programs allow those already in the US to seek asylum:
http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.eb1d4c2a3e5b9ac89243c6a7543f6d1a/?vgnextoid=3a82ef4c766fd010VgnVCM1000000ecd190aRCRD&vgnextchannel=3a82ef4c766fd010VgnVCM1000000ecd190aRCRD
Amnesty programs and other special programs:
The US granted 3 million illegal aliens amnesty in 1986:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1106/p13s01-ussc.html
The US allowed 80,000 Chinese students to stay in the US in 1989:
http://www.ilw.com/immigdaily/news/2006,0207-crs.pdf
after the Tiananmen Square massacre.
There have been recent calls to grant amnesty to the 12 million - 20 million illegal aliens in the US.
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