Mr Sutherland, a special representative of the UN secretary general for migration, said Ireland needed to pour energy into creating shared experiences in education and suggested creating obligatory community service for school graduates. “Simply put, we cannot expect people to integrate into our societies if we are all strangers to one another,” he said. At an event yesterday organised by the Immigrant Council of Ireland, he said there should be investment in experiments that brought children together in camps during the summer and created shared experiences. Mr Sutherland, who also chairs Goldman Sachs International, said Ireland was promoting integration in some ways, such as allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections and opening Garda recruitment to non-Irish.
However, he said, Ireland’s performance as measured by the migrant integration policy index – which ranks developed countries on key indicators – was “nothing to write home about”. It found Ireland was among the least prepared to help newcomers to do well in school and put it 28th on labour market mobility...
Irish Times: Schools 'need to integrate'
Thomas Huddleston
Policy Analyst, Migration Policy Group
Thomas Huddleston is a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Group, a European think-and-do-tank. He coordinates MPG’s research for European cooperation on national integration policies, including the second and third editions of the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) (published in February 2011) and the third edition of the European Commission’s Handbook on Integration.
