The Republic of Ireland will offer families of supposed asylum seekers up to €10,000 to drop their claims and voluntarily leave the country, in an apparent admission that the government’s open borders policies have gone too far.
Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan has signed an order to increase the voluntary return grant for alleged asylum seekers, increasing the payout to €2,500 ($2,900) for individuals or €10,000 ($11,700) for families who willingly drop their asylum claims and leave the country, The Irish Times reports.
This is nearly double the previous payouts, which stood at €1,500 ($1,800) per person or €6,000 ($7,000) per family, prior to the order from Minister O’Callaghan.
The scheme, which is intended to focus on those with dubious asylum claims, will be limited to those who are awaiting judgment, and who have not committed any crimes while residing in Ireland.
The return allowance is likely to be significantly cheaper to taxpayers than the asylum process, which, according to the Department of Justice in Dublin, costs around €122,000 ($143,000) per migrant, including housing, food, and other social programmes afforded to migrants as their asylum claims are being processed.
It is also likely to be cheaper than deportations, with The Irish Times reporting that a deportation flight to remove 35 migrants to Nigeria cost the government a total of €325,000 ($381,000).
The returns allowance scheme is similar to that seen in other European nations, such as Sweden, which currently provides €5,000 ($5,900) to asylum seekers or failed asylum seekers to leave the country.
However, Sweden is reportedly considering vastly expanding the programme, and to go beyond funding the return of alleged asylum seekers to migrants in general.
According to a report from Infomigrants, the conservative government in Stockholm is planning on paying up to €30,000 ($35,000) to low-income, long-term unemployed, or welfare-dependent migrants to return to their homelands.
The schemes have seen some success. Indeed, asylum applications dropped to a 40-year low in Sweden last year, and a similar scheme in Germany saw over 8,000 failed asylum seekers voluntarily leave the country.
Late last year, the German government revealed that the policy had ensured that more than 8,000 migrants had returned to their home countries in 10 months.
Ireland has been particularly hard hit by mass migration, with the migrant population doubling since 2006 to over a million people, or one in five of the entire population. This has coincided with widespread social unrest following horrific migrant crimes, and stagnating wages as the labour market was flooded with cheap foreign workers.
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