28 Waiting in Line To Be Legal
Posted by Christine on Dec 28, 2014 in Ireland | 2 comments A few weeks ago Ron and I spent an entire day—from 7:45 a.m. to 5:45 p.m.—at the Irish Immigration and Naturalization Service office on Burgh Quay here in Dublin. We were there to register for our extended residence, something we should have done months earlier. Because of some confusion in the instructions Ron received from Trinity, we hadn’t realized that we needed to take this step until our son Evan flew in to Dublin to visit us in November. Evan told the gardaí (the “guardians” or police, from An Garda Síochána, guardian of the peace) at passport control that he was coming to stay with his parents who were here for a year. They looked us up and found that we weren’t properly registered. No one likes to get a call from a stern-voiced policeman at 8 a.m. in the morning saying “I’m with your son here at the airport.” It turned out that our mistake was not a big deal and easily resolved, but for a week or so until we could devote a day to the process of getting registered, we had a small taste of the tension and fear faced not only by undocumented immigrants but also by anyone who comes under the authority of the always byzantine bureaucracy of immigration departments here, in the US, and throughout the world. With generations of emigration to its history, Ireland is used to people leaving the country in search of a better life, but only in the last thirty years or so has immigration begun to change the face–literally and figuratively–of this formerly homogeneous country. More welcoming than some destinations but by no means perfectly adjusted to the reality of new faces, new languages, new customs, new religions, new foods, and new perspectives, Ireland is trying to figure out how a people that have found new homes and lives all over the world should react to others seeking the same things on this island. It was cold and pitch dark as we walked from our apartment to the INIS office at 7:15 a.m., though the streets were filled with people on their way to and from work. As we took our places in the dishearteningly long line winding around the block outside the building, we saw quite a few people who had obviously been there all night, as evidenced by their blankets and sleeping bags, coffee cups and food...read more