A company wants to hire an electrician, but the state is trying to deport him

The meeting had officially ended when Joseph Sesay shot up his hand.

Dozens of people, sat in an audience at the Teachers Club on Parnell Square last Wednesday night, turned their heads towards him.

Anti-racist lawyers, the Movement of Asylum Seekers Ireland (MASI) and other community and civil rights campaigners had organised the public meeting to bust myths around the asylum process.

Sesay’s voice trembled. He was breathing aloud, deep and heavy.

He had started from scratch as an electrician here, he told the crowd. Even though he had already qualified in Sierra Leone, his country of birth.

He was working when his asylum claim and appeal were rejected, he said. Then came a deportation order.

His boss wants to sponsor a work permit for him, for him to stay here and in the job, but he can’t apply, he said. “They say because I was in asylum …”

Sesay fell silent, gazing low and breathing heavily. The audience stared at him for a bit. Then, a wave of applause.

Wendy Lyon, partner and solicitor at Abbey Law – who was one of the speakers that night – watched Sesay from a front seat. She shook her head when he said he was told he couldn’t apply for a work permit.

A spokesperson for the Department of Employment said later by email that if someone is facing a deportation order, they should abide by it, leave the country and apply for a work permit from abroad.

Lyon – who has successfully challenged the department in similar cases twice –  says as the High Court had ruled in a December 2021 judgment, telling someone it isn’t possible to apply because they have no status here contradicts the law, which gives the minister discretion.

The department has to take the work permit application and assess its merits, regardless of the applicant’s status, Lyon says.

It has the power to grant, she says. “In no way is it the case that being in the state without permission is a bar to even applying for a work permit.”

Starting from scratch

An internal document released to Lyon more than a decade ago under the Freedom of Information Act suggests that the Department of Justice was calling the shots about what statuses people should have, to be allowed to apply for work permits.

Officials at the Department of Employment said that it was concerned that, in following Department of Justice policy, “it was turning away otherwise ‘good’ applications”, says the document released to Lyon.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said anyone with a deportation order who refuses to leave faces criminal charges and can be arrested without a warrant.

Deportation orders can be revoked in some circumstances on a case-by-case basis, they said.

Getting a job offer and applying for a work permit doesn’t cancel the deportation order, the spokesperson said.

Lyon, the solicitor, says if someone’s work permit application gets granted they can apply to revoke their deportation order off the back of that.

Sesay says he can’t go back to Sierra Leone to apply from there. He doesn’t feel safe going back, he says. That’s why he sought asylum.

“I was here when my mum passed away. I wasn’t able to go back home,” he said on Thursday at a late-night café in the city centre.

Over his tracksuit jacket, he was wearing a navy blue gilet with the logo of the company that wants to sponsor his permit.

When Sesay arrived here, he went to Citizens Information, he says. “They said my qualifications don’t work here.”

He apprenticed again and again. “I started from grassroots,” says Sesay.

Apprenticeships were scraping-by gigs and hard to live on. “They were paying me €8.50 per hour.”

One of his jobs was doing electrical work on the new Children’s Hospital, says Sesay, who has lived here for two years.

When he got his Irish qualifications, he started to work at the company that now wants to sponsor him, he said. “I’m important in their company, I worked very hard.”

A private solicitor who he had turned to for the work permit application ghosted him, says Sesay. “My director was asking me several times, I said, ‘These people, they never respond to me’.”

Finally, a lawyer with a non-profit told him he couldn’t apply because of his deportation order. “She told me that won’t be possible.”

“We asked for workers”

Sesay’s barriers to work and an alternative path to status in Ireland come even as the government says it needs more electricians, if it is to ramp up the number of homes being built.

Sixteen countries in the European Union reported a shortage of electricians in 2023, according to a report from the European Employment Services.

While Ireland isn’t among those 16, the Irish government made electrician positions eligible for work permits last December.

“This will help us to build more homes,” said Neale Richmond, a Fine Gael TD who was Minister of State at the Department of Employment at the time.

That there are labour shortages, and how most people seeking asylum want to work, cropped up a bunch at the public meeting at the Teachers Club.

But so too did the problems with reducing people’s worth and humanity to how they can serve an economy.

“Asylum seekers aren’t looking for handouts. That’s just a myth that really, really needs to be quashed,” said Lyon at the meeting.

Lyon explained how, for many years, people seeking asylum weren’t allowed to work legally.

Now, they can apply for permits after waiting for five months without a decision on their asylum application. But a sluggish system keeps people reliant on the government for longer.

“The work permit system, at the moment, is so backed up that people aren’t getting their permit,” said Lyon.

At the event, a Black woman from South Africa –  a single mother living in an asylum shelter in Dublin with her teenage boy – relayed the hardships of navigating the asylum system as someone whose country of birth has been labelled “safe” and effectively stripped of the right to work because of that.

If someone’s asylum claim is rejected less than five months after they apply, they fall short of qualifying for a work permit.

“Which means you’re dependent on the state even longer,” the woman said.

Towards the end of the meeting, someone in the audience raised how some immigrants are disabled and can never work. They should be accepted, too, they said. Lyon said she agreed.

Ebun Joseph, an academic and special rapporteur of the government’s advisory group on racial equality and racism, says that activists and politicians sometimes use the argument that immigrants can serve the economy or Irish people to counter those who portray them as a strain on state resources.

It’s well-intentioned but dehumanising, she said on the phone on Saturday. “It turns people into commodities.”

It normalises the notion that they’re disposable like objects, said Joseph. There’s more to people than the jobs they do, she said.

Calling immigrants good for the economy or servers of Irish people as a way to defend their existence also heaps undue pressure on them to overwork to feel useful all the time or else feel unwanted, said Joseph

“They are held to much higher standards than other people, and it causes a lot of mental health challenges,” she said.

Say it

Sesay, the electrician from Sierra Leone, says he hadn’t planned to speak up when he went to the meeting last week.

“When that sister spoke, I was inspired,” he said.

He was talking about the woman from South Africa. Throughout her speech, her voice shook, as she painted a picture of her life, unable to work and uncertain about the future, sharing a cubicle with her teenage son.

Sesay said he was also touched by Lyon’s account of the asylum-seeking process as closest to the reality of his experiences.

He recently got a transfer letter from his asylum shelter because of his deportation order, he said.

On Thursday night, he said he had just checked into a Dublin asylum hub.

International Protection Accommodation Services (IPAS) is sending him there “so I won’t go into homelessness”, he said.

These days, despite everything, he’s studying at a city college, he said. His deportation order and college acceptance letter both arrived in the same week.