Immigrant care-workers wait with guilt, for years, for word of whether their children can join them

Deborah Shu’s voice is shaking.

“I have gone through a phase of depression twice, and I’ve been put on depression tablets,” she says.

“Imagine,” says Shylet Mazuru.

Shu and Mazuru are both mums from outside of the European Economic Area (EEA), working as healthcare assistants in Ireland and navigating separation from their children and partners back in their countries of birth.

When they accepted job offers in Ireland over two years ago, they didn’t imagine prolonged separation and loneliness, they say.

A recruitment agency told them the wait won’t be too long, they say.

“They asked us, ‘Are you comfortable to stay alone, without your family for 12 months?’” says Mazuru.

But that’s only the window of time it takes for care-workers on general work permits to qualify for family reunions and submit join-family visa applications.

That is, if they earn enough to meet family reunification salary requirements, which keeps reunion out of reach for some non-EEA healthcare assistants.

If they can clear that hurdle and apply, it still takes more time – potentially years – for the government to process those applications and, possibly, issue the visas.

The Citizen Information website, a resource that some had turned to before moving here, says it takes a year to be able to apply but doesn’t spell out lengthy processing times.

As they wait, mothers like Mazuru and Shu say it means they wrestle with grief and the guilt of not being there for their kids and watch distance ruin their relationships. “This is breaking our marriages,” said Shu.

The Department of Justice’s Irish Immigration website suggests it’s still processing some join-family visa applications received in July 2023.

So there are people who waited a year, applied back then, and have now spent two and a half years living apart from their families.

However, a spokesperson for the Department of Justice said it has processed the “vast majority” of applications it got between 2022 and 2023.

The Minister for Justice values the contribution of immigrants to Irish society and “fully understands people moving to Ireland to live and work would wish to have their family join them here”, the spokesperson said.

Working to improve

In 2024, the Department of Justice received about 22,000 new join-family visa applications, a 14 percent uptick from 2023, the spokesperson said.

This is part of an overall increase in visa applications, which rose 21 percent from 2023 to 2024, reaching 201,700 that year, the spokesperson said.

In recent months, the department has beefed up resources for its visa division, and is expecting waiting times to lower in the coming months, the spokesperson said.

There are different schemes for family reunification, so processing times for its applications can vary, the spokesperson said.

But it’s aiming to process join-family visa applications from family members of people like those on general work permits in 12 months, they said.

“The Minister is acutely aware that join family applications, are very important for the persons impacted and is committed to improving the service the Department provides,” they said.

I thought it would be faster

Memory Mutsaka says she left her little boy in Zimbabwe to come here and work with disadvantaged children in Ireland as a social-care worker.

Her kid, who is now four years old, has a chronic autoimmune disease, she said.

She can’t hold him and care for him when he has flare-ups and asks for his mama, said Mutsaka, who applied for a join-family visa last April.

“We’re taking care of other families, but I can’t take care of my own family.”

Healthcare assistants are not nurses but help care for older people or people with health conditions, so they can navigate daily life easier and stay safe.

In 2024, the Department of Employment granted almost 12,500 work permits to non-EEA immigrants to work in the health and social-work sector. That’s the highest number of permits issued for a sector last year.

Mutsaka, the mum whose kid has an autoimmune disease, says she had looked at the Citizen Information website and thought her family could join her quickly after a year of separation.

“When I left my husband, we were positive that him and my child were going to join me after a year,” said Mutsaka.

All the mums, still waiting to be reunited with their families, say they weren’t familiar with the rules, and if they had fully understood them and known they’d have to live without their families for so long, they might have decided differently.

They resigned from their jobs back in their country of birth to come to Ireland in search of better wages and happier lives for their kids, they said.

“I worked in a hospital in Zimbabwe as a primary care nurse,” said Mazuru, one of the mums, who applied for visas to reunite with her family in October 2023.

The Department of Justice still has not issued decisions on those visas for her children, Mazuru said.

Mutsaka, Shu and Mazuru have a WhatsApp group chat with other mums in the same boat, seeking comfort and sharing experiences and advice. It’s called “Family reunification group” and has 59 members.

Calls for reforming the family-reunification process for healthcare assistants were raised at the Dáil by Social Democrats leader and TD Holly Cairns, and Sinn Féin’s Claire Kerrane TD back in July 2023.

At the time, former Minister for Health Fianna Fáil’s Stephen Donnelly told them that its conditions were set by the Department of Justice, which was reviewing its family reunification policy.

Feeling the guilt

Shu, one of the mums, says she and her husband have had to share copies of their most intimate conversations with officials at the Department of Justice – to try to get a reunion visa that never seems to come.

For years, Wendy Lyon, partner and immigration solicitor at Abbey Law, has handed over heaps of intimate texts from her clients to the Department of Justice to prove that they are in a genuine relationship or marriage, she says.

The Irish courts have ruled that that practice is lawful, Lyon says. But she’s not sold that it’s the correct position “under either constitutional law or Article 8 of the European Convention [on human rights]”, she says.

That is the right to privacy and family life. “I think most people would be appalled that civil servants in the Department of Justice are allowed to have access to a couple’s intimate marital conversations,” Lyon said.

Applicants not only have to share these private messages with the department, they also have to meet an income threshold.

For some time, healthcare assistants’ wages were so low that they didn’t qualify for family reunification at all, even if they didn’t have kids.

Labour TD Ged Nash raised the issue at the Dáil back in June 2023, asking if the minimum wage for healthcare assistants could be raised from €27,000 to €30,000 “to help them reach the threshold for family reunification”.

This has now happened. But even if someone makes enough to bring their partner over, they may not make enough to bring their kids, too.

The income threshold rises based on the number of kids workers have. It takes a higher salary to bring more kids to Ireland.

Michael O’Brien, regional officer for the trade union Unite, says it is supporting a worker whose application was turned down because she could afford just enough to bring her husband.

“So, in the appeal, they’ve adjusted and removed the [two] children from the application,” O’Brien said.

With three kids, Mazuru, one of the mums waiting, worries about a similar fate, she said.

Unite has organised a protest for 13 February at 11am outside the Department of Employment on Kildare Street “to demand urgent reform of the earning rules separating [healthcare assistants] from their families”, it said in a news release.

O’Brien, Unite’s regional officer, says the system is deeply unfair to non-EEA healthcare assistants working in Ireland. “They work long hours, and they’re predominantly women,” he said.

Last April, then Labour TD Brendan Howlin asked the Minister for Justice in the Dáil about rejection of healthcare assistants’ family reunion visas, and how it was “having an impact on the recruitment and retention of healthcare assistants”.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said last week that another round of reform for its non-EEA family reunification policy is in the works.

The scope of the review is broad and covers things like “family reunification, including the nature and suitability of current income thresholds and waiting periods”, they said.

Meanwhile, as people working in lower-wage jobs like healthcare assistants struggle alone and wait, another group of people moving to Ireland to work are having a different experience.

Those granted critical skills work permits – issued to non-EEA immigrants who have skills for which there’s a shortage, like some types of tech workers, engineers or animators – are generally higher-paid, so they are more likely to meet the income thresholds.

And they can apply for Irish visas with their families and move to Ireland together, so there’s no facing a long and lonely wait like what Mazuru and other mums are dealing with.

Mazuru, who has three kids, mentions that and how she’s unsure if her application to bring them to Ireland would be approved because of the salary threshold.

“My first one is 15 years now, the second one is 12 years, and the third one is 10,” she said.

Mazuru says she feels guilty when the kids have a school event, and all the parents show up, but she can’t be there for her kids.

Her long working hours and time zone differences mean she can’t video call them as much as she wants either, she said.

“They tell me, ‘Why did you abandon us?’ I’m so depressed, I’m so so depressed,” Mazuru said.