7,840 illegal immigrants in Ireland have applied for the government’s “regularisation” scheme to receive an amnesty to remain within the State.
The scheme, which ran from January to July of this year, offered many illegal immigrants the right to apply for Stamp 4 permission to live and work in Ireland – despite many of them breaching Irish immigration law by entering or remaining in the country without permission under the radar of authorities.
While the government claims that an estimated 17,000 illegal migrants are present within the State, Gript previously established that no official studies have been conducted to reach this estimate, and that it appears to be based on unsubstantiated claims by the Migrant Rights Centre, who are a pro-amnesty advocacy group.
The Minister for Justice Helen McEntee has again failed to provide any evidence to back her Department's claim that multiple studies suggest there are only 17,000 illegal immigrants in Ireland.https://t.co/JsdEsl8mQN
— gript (@griptmedia) January 20, 2022
More than 1,450 of the applicants have already received their papers, as reported by the Irish Times, while thousands more are awaiting documentation. In one week alone, 640 amnesty applications were made.
The highest number of applications came from Brazilian nationals (1,316).
In addition to this, 1,074 Pakistanis, 1,019 Chinese, 725 Filipinos, 373 Nigerians, 253 Indians, 241 Bangladeshis, 207 Egyptians, 207 Malaysians, 193 Mauritians and 1,506 “others” applied as well.
Following the conclusion of the scheme, the Green Party took to Twitter to boast about the achievement, saying it was a “key Green Party ask in the Programme for Government.”
7,840 people applied to regularise their legal status to live in Ireland before a 'once-in-a-generation' scheme, which was a key Green Party ask in the Programme for Government, closed on July 31. Around 1500 applicants have already received their papers. https://t.co/sG7V8E9u3V
— Green Party Ireland (@greenparty_ie) August 10, 2022
Notably, almost all parties within the state supported some form of amnesty, with even opposition parties like Sinn Féin proposing a blanket offer for 26,000 undocumented (which has since been deleted).
https://web.archive.org/web/20211222073554/https://www.sinnfein.ie/ga/contents/43912
As Gript reported earlier this year, there has been a huge drop in deportations for “serious criminal convictions” since Justice Minister Helen McEntee took office.
Huge drop in criminal deportations since McEntee took office
Additionally, at a Joint Committee meeting on the 11th of July 2018, Michael Kirrane, Director General of the Irish immigration service, admitted that when a deportation order is issued to someone, the obligation is on the person to remove themselves from the State, and that no exit checks are used to verify if the person actually left or not.