All Immigrants in Ireland must go back home

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The heading says it all. At the moment in Ireland this is what pertains. Immigrants must go back home. Ordinarily, a silly suggestion such as this would not elicit much response from me, but what the heck!

Here is a letter which was written to the Independent newspapers by a member of the public:

It is titled 'Immigrants must go home'

Sunday March 01 2009

"Sir -- Some years ago in the United Kingdom a well known parliamentarian called Enoch Powell proposed a scheme for dealing with excessive immigration into the country. He would pay each immigrant £2,000 if he or she agreed to return home. At the time that was a lot of money.

I understand that some immigrants are collecting social welfare payments in this country. In addition some immigrants are collecting children's allowance here and at the same time in their own country. If immigrants agreed to return home, they should be paid four weeks' unemployment money to help them on their way. At present unemployed immigrants have little hope of re-employment here. During the boom such people enjoyed gainful employment. They should now reciprocate our kindness by returning home, thus alleviating our economic difficulties.

Bernard Kileen,

Ennis, Co Clare"

It is easy, when things are difficult,to blame immigrants for all sorts of issues, but to blame immigrants for Irish recession is taking things beyond the bounds of stupidity. It is not such a new idea anyway, I mean, Hitler used the same excuse to try to purge Germany of Jews and other immigrants, so if the Irish public and some politicians have decided to use 'immigrants' as scape goats for  bad decisions that have been made in the past, then i wouldn't be surprised.

I wonder what would happen if the USA, Australia, New Zealand and other countries where there large concentrations of Irish migrants, all got up tomorrow and said 'all Irish people have to go back home, things are so difficult here now and we can't stand you no more!'

An argument most often postulated by those who want migrants to go back home is the one of the dole. They believe that migrants have no right to be on the dole. I just feel that this is somewhat silly. A lot of the migrants receiving unemployment benefits today are people who have being working in this country for a long while, some for maybe, upwards of 5 years. They also contributed in their way to the Celtic Tiger. They paid taxes which were used to keep a lot of Irish people on the dole. So now things are bad and they have lost their jobs, they are not entitled to a little bit of money from the State?

To be honest, these are not the times to start throwing blames at immigrants or at a particular group of people. This is a time when we should all collectively rise up and work towards making the Celtic Tiger roar again. We should not let silly, inane and stupid arguments or thoughts derail us from this singular objective. Yes, the times are hard but let us not start behaving like the uncivilized.

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