Ireland: Racial state and crisis racism1 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ireland: Racial State and Crisis Racism
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2007
This article theorises the state as central to the construction of racism in the Republic of Ireland, which, since the 1990s economic boom, has become an in-migration destination. State racism culminated in the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, in which, at a majority of four to one, the Irish electorate voted for the removal of birth right citizenship to children of migrants. Based on Goldberg's theory of the racial state, which, in constructing homogeneity, obscures existing heterogeneities, and on Foucault's theory of biopolitics, leading to the state supposedly caring for the population through a series of technologies aiming to regulate and manage racial diversities, the article examines recent developments in Ireland's immigration and asylum policies. The debates around the Citizenship Referendum are theorized as constructing what Balibar terms 'crisis racism', blaming migrants for the problems of the system.
Ties that bind: governmentality, the state, and asylum in contemporary Ireland
Coinciding with the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom of the 1990s, Ireland experienced a momentous shift in long-standing patterns of migration, with significant in-migration and an unprecedented change in population dynamics. Asylum seekers form a small and noteworthy group within the population in association with several recent legislative changes. In 2003 a previously granted guarantee of residency rights for so-called ‘non-national’ migrant parents whose children were born in Ireland was withdrawn; subsequently, in 2004 voters endorsed a referendum doing away with the Irish Constitution’s provision for birthright citizenship. With this, many asylum seekers and their children who were born in Ireland were excluded from the possibility of establishing intimate ties within society and to the state. This social context forms the backdrop for examining the intersections between governmentality and the intimate ties between populations and nation-state. Drawing on recent attention to Foucault’s lectures on Security, Territory, Population, three specifics themes are elaborated; these are: (i) government as a continuum of overlapping apparatuses; (ii) intersections between sovereign territory and population; and (iii) the question of the state in Foucault’s work. These themes are elucidated with reference to housing policies, living conditions, and newsprint discourses that prevailed upon women asylum seekers in particular prior to Ireland’s 2004 citizenship referendum. The associated unraveling and rearrangement of governmental practices and rejigging of the Irish State highlights some of the ways intimacy and population are tangled together as populations are produced.
" Everyone With Eyes Can See the Problem": Moral Citizens and the Space of Irish Nationhood
International Migration, 2007
This paper examines Ireland's 2004 Constitutional Amendment which removes birthright citizenship from any future Irish-born children of immigrant parents. I argue that for particular historical reasons, the ability of the state to convince its citizens of the necessity for this Amendment was remarkable and I suggest that it was able to do so by constructing citizenship as a moral regime and foreign-nationals and their foetuses as 'suspect patriots.' I describe how the notion of immorality is laminated upon black bodies — specifically black pregnant women — and how the presence of black migrant workers, refugees and asylees consequently comes to be experienced in Irish national space as transgressive, their political subjecthood constrained by the supposedly legible abjectivity of their bodies. The issue of race remains unenunciated, and yet, as the Minister for Justice stated during the referendum debate, 'anyone with eyes can see the problem.' The Irish government's privileging of moral rather than cultural incommensurability is strikingly similar to culturalist rhetorics of exclusion that are often invoked when race is at issue in European public debate on immigration. Configured upon, and therefore experienced as a type of body, immorality becomes an alibi for race and is naturalized as a form of exclusion and as a potential site of state intervention in the form of xenophobic legislation and policymaking. Reading this decision as merely racist however, fails to give voice to the experiences of Irish Citizens who voted for this Amendment. Their struggle to build a "New Ireland" and to accept a multiculturalist framework in the face of neo-liberal restructuring policies and a European-wide retreat from the welfare state must be considered as being in dialectical tension with the ideological smearing of immigrants if we are to fully grasp the complex interaction between relations of power and the privileging of difference.
In this paper we examine the discursive production and employment of, what Irish politicians term, 'commonsense citizenship' as a means of addressing and regulating new immigration to Ireland, and in re-defining Irishness and Irish citizenship (culminating in a national Citizenship referendum in June 2004). We argue that commonsense citizenship is employed in such a way as to fix and essentialise Irishness, thus highlighting the threatening other, and to construct immigrants as suspect, untrustworthy, and deserving of Ireland's 'hospitality' only in limited, prescribed ways or not at all. Through examining six troubling paradoxes we reveal slippages, contradictions and nuances that commonsense citizenship works to deny and erase, but nevertheless work to undermine its essentialism and injustices. In so doing, we argue these paradoxes open ways to rethink Irish citizenship, and how such a notion is produced discursively.
Racialization and the Construction of Deportability in Ireland
Deportability, distinct from but related to the act of deportation, is the threat of forced expulsion from the state. Although there is a growing body of literature around deportability as a concept and in the European context, there has been limited research on deportability in Ireland. Moreover, there has been minimal engagement with deportability as a racialized technology of the state. Using Ireland as a case study, this project investigates the racializing processes inherent in the construction of deportability and, in so doing, makes evident the links between immigration controls and racialized regimes of oppression. A thematic analysis of state, media and NGO discourses in Ireland lays bare the ways in which the construction of deportability racializes ‘the deportable’. Through human rights and legal discourses, the Irish state normalizes and makes invisible the institution of deportability. NGO and media discourses, though frequently critical of the practice of deportation, reduce ‘the deportable’ to a limited number of essentialized traits, including criminality, sexual deviancy and victimhood. When read inter-textually, these discourses racialize ‘the deportable’ as Other while normalizing their condition of deportability. Narratives and expressions authored by ‘the deportable’ offer perhaps a way to counter these racializing processes, but academics must be sensitive to the role of research in Othering.
In defence of methodological nationalism: immigrants and the Irish nation-state
Irish Journal of Sociology, 2013
The focus of this article is on tensions between transnationalism and methodological nationalism in the sociology of immigration, with reference to sociological analyses of the Irish case. Cosmopolitans, critical theorists and others who emphasis global interdependences, inequalities and risks see the focus on the nation-state as deeply flawed. The case for sociological transnationalism is that it addresses lives lived at odds with borders, nation-state containers and the cages of national identities. It challenges perceptions that the nation-state, a relatively new human invention, is natural, inevitable or static. However, both nationalism and ethnicity have persisted as categorical identities invoked by elites and other participants in political and social struggles and need to be still taken seriously.
Irish Studies Review. Special Issue ‘Irish Multiculturalism in Crisis’. Volume 24, Number 1.
Irish Studies Review, 2016
Since the collapse of its Celtic Tiger economy, Ireland has experienced not only a reversal of fortune but also of migratory flows that have transformed it from an emigrant-sending to an immigrant-receiving society, and then into a nation of emigrants once again. This volatile situation has led to rapidly changing perceptions of migrants coming to and going from Ireland. Public expectations that non-Irish migrants would return to their countries of origin in times of economic recession have proven to be wrong. Most immigrants were Here to Stay, as expressed succinctly in the title of a 2000 documentary film by Alan Grossman and Áine O’Brien. The presence of these immigrants in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, however, seems to be overshadowed by other realities. The intense and often contested debates on migration that dominated the headlines of Irish newspapers and broadcast media during the boom years inevitably dissipated. “As daily news of bank bailouts and draconian budget cuts, mortgage defaults, debt, house repossessions and emigration fill the post-Tiger Irish air with despair and bewilderment, no one mentions diversity and integration any longer”, notes Ronit Lentin. While the Irish state concentrated its efforts in recovering from the economic downfall, the focus of the media shifted away to other heated concerns, not only the dire recession of the country and the new austerity measures but also the many political and religious scandals of recent years. This special issue of Irish Studies Review examines the often overlooked presence of non-Irish migrants in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland by considering in detail the socio-cultural implications of the country’s economic collapse, its impact on immigrants, and the ramifications from the resumption of emigration for Irish society.
The Politics of Migration to Western Europe: Ireland in Comparative Perspective
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 01402380802507580, 2008
The Politics of Migration to Western Europe: Ireland in Comparative Perspective This article locates Ireland's relatively recent experience with mass immigration within a comparative West European context. It poses two questions: To what degree has Ireland become a "normal" country of immigration? What does the Irish case reveal about the contemporary politics of migration to Western Europe? The article's main finding is that Ireland's experience with mass immigration since the 1990s appears to be following a political trajectory similar to that of the traditional immigration-receiving states, despite being removed from the latter by as many as four decades. This said, the evidence suggests that some of the policy challenges precipitated by mass immigrant settlement may be currently arriving earlier in time than previously.