THE IMMIGRATION issue, which surfaced after last week’s clashes on the Larnaca sea-front, sparked public debate, but inevitably it was taken over by the populists in the legislature. Deputies were outraged to discover that in the Labour Ministry’s 2011 budget €30 million had been allocated for immigrants and asylum seekers.
Rikkos Erotokritou, chairman of House institutions committee, described the expenditure as ‘provocative’ in the current economic climate adding that the government policies were turning Cyprus into a “tourist attraction for migrants who could not be bothered to work.” He said the House would reject this item of expenditure. DISY deputy Andreas Themistocleous warned that these policies would increase racism and xenophobia among the local population.
He did not mention that racism and xenophobia would also be boosted by deputies feigning outrage over the amounts spent on benefits for political refugees and asylum seekers. In 2009 €15.6 million went on benefits for these people, said the Labour Minister Sotiroulla Charalambous at the committee meeting. It was not an excessive amount while the figure for next year included the construction of another centre for refugees and asylum seekers.
The fact is that these people need to be taken care of when they arrive here and putting them in a centre is preferable to leaving them roaming the streets or jailing them. The government also has to follow the EU directives for dealing with asylum seekers and political refugees. It cannot just put them on a boat and send them to another country, as its critics seem to be implying. There are certain procedures that need to be followed and the government is doing exactly that.
Neither Erotokritou nor the ultra-nationalist organisation which marched in Larnaca last week have come up with any sensible suggestion about how to deal with the illegal immigrants arriving in Cyprus. This is because there are no easy answers or solutions. Does the state leave them to fend for themselves until their applications are processed? Should it lock them up, or should it put them in rubber dinghy and leave them in the middle of the Mediterranean?
In fairness, the government’s immigration policy has been quite effective. It has speeded up the processing of asylum applications (pending applications are currently 995 compared to 8,567 in 2007) and the review of appeals (a thousand less this year) and it has reduced the number of illegal immigrants crossing from the north. This is a marked improvement which does not justify criticism.
But this is just part of the immigration issue. Some 200,000 immigrants are estimated to be living in Cyprus at present, half of whom are EU nationals; illegals account for 30 per cent of the third-country nationals here. These are big numbers for a tiny country like Cyprus and are bound to have an unsettling effect on society. But turning Cypriots against immigrants by focusing on a tiny percentage that are paid state benefits is no way of dealing with the issue. In fact it is a surefire method of creating bigger social problems.
