Immigration Control: A Pointless Exercise

Day 904, 10:50 • Published in Ireland Ireland • by Theus Jackus


To those of you who frequent the eIreland forums, you may have come across a recent Dail Investigation into the conduct of Minister for Information and Labour TD, James Ferrin. The issue at hand was the illegal granting of a citizenship pass to one Vehk (who later emerged to be a Mannimarco Multi). It also became clear that there was a potential bribe given from Vehk to James, although this has been denied by the latter. Although the investigation at this moment in time appears to be faltering and it is clear that nothing will come of it, it brings up a question. Is there really any point in attempting to administrate the allocation of citizenship in Ireland?

I'm now going to sound like an old fart and go back to a time when the concept of Citizenship had just been introduced to eRepublik, in a bid to prevent Political Take Overs (PTOs) from happening within countries. It was nearly universally agreed that regulation was needed for Citizenship Passes and because at the time I was still actively contributing to eIreland, I came up with an intricate points system for use when allocating citizenship. It considered things like how productive they would be in eIrish Businesses to what their past positions had been within the game. The scheme was a massive and utter failure.

What ensued afterwards was a massive backlog of applications that had to be processed by a single Minister (my apologies to Darragh O'Faolain for the headaches he received as a result of my scheme). To add to this, many TDs (mostly forum inactive ones) were deciding to hand out the passes at their discretion, thus undermining the whole system. As a result of this, it was agreed that the points system should be abolished and that a simple history check would be the only thing needed.

So why am I brining up this ancient (by eRep standards) scheme that was doomed to failure? Because I feel that it didn't go far enough in its reforms.

For the most part, the system of citizenship has failed. Despite the fact that there are a limited number of citizenship passes per month per country, PTOs still happen on a regular basis and are a favourite tactic amongst alliances. The admins have never intervened against a PTO, with the exception of the Norwegian PTO, but even this was due to the President being banned for multis. Citizenship just doesn't work in this game. However, it is a game mechanic and as with many of the mechanics of eRepublik, why we may not like them, we do have to work with them.

So what am I suggesting?

I am suggesting (and not officially proposing, I'll make that clear now) that we completely abolish the Department of Immigration and any attempts to control immigration within eIreland. Will it leave us any more open to PTOs? Slightly but saying this, as of this moment, there is no reason that any alliance would want to PTO Ireland, we are strategically and economically obsolete. Will this change a lot of things? Definitely not, but it will leave us with one less thing to worry about each month and allow Ireland to have an open border.

In my opinion, the members of the Dail should be allowed to grant passes at their own discretion. I think that the elected officials of this country should be given enough credit to make their own judgements on applications. While this may seem a tad idealistic (and let’s face it, it's not exactly hard to get elected) I would like to believe that if someone has been elected by the people of Ireland, their duties should include the discretionary granting of citizenship.

While a very small issue in the greater scheme of things, I think that this is a reform that is needed in Ireland. While it shouldn't be at the top of Patton's to do list by any means, I think it should be an issue that is addressed this month.