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Visa blues

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

But critics of the program, including some of its participants, say that to date it has been a failure due to mismanagement and a failure to adequately prepare its participants for the demands of working life in the U.S.
The program, one of many confidence-building measures that grew out of the 1988 Good Friday agreement, has been severely criticized since its creation after participants reported falling into the hands of bad employers. Many have also criticized the program?s administrator, the Virginia-based defense contractor Northrop Grumman, for being unresponsive to their needs.
Most serious has been the case of James Murray and Ruth Gould, a Belfast couple who have filed a $101 million lawsuit in a New York federal court accusing Northrop Grumman and its parent company, Logicon, of negligence, causing personal injuries and breach of contract after the pair were arrested and jailed on spurious charges of terrorism made by their Las Vegas employer, who was supposed to have been vetted by Northrop Grumman.
The couple?s attorney, Eamonn Dornan of New York, has been one of the program?s strongest critics.
?It?s not been an absolute disaster,? said Dornan, who says that of the program?s 12,000 Walsh visas signed into law by President Clinton on St Patrick?s Day 2000, as few as 600 participants may have successfully completed their three-year training in the U.S. ?But from start to finish, it has been so badly mismanaged,? he said.
A spokesperson for Rep. James Walsh, the New York representative who crafted the program, said that ?about 1,000? had completed the program successfully so far. The spokesperson also said that the program?s new legislation would smooth over many of its initial problems. Over each of the program?s initial three years, up to 4,000 young Irish people were supposed to start their three-year training.
Dornan said that while the case of Murray and Gould was extreme, many other young Irish people have had bad experiences of the program. In addition, many young Irish people who joined the program were unprepared for its demands and for the unfamiliarity of living and working in U.S. society.
In 2001, deputies in the Dail asked questions about the program?s mishaps, noting on one occasion that the people who fell foul of its problems were already ?the unemployed, weaker and more vulnerable in our society.?
Acknowledging that the program participants were unprepared for the demands of the program, Dornan said. ?Yes, people are going to get into trouble.?
?But they can?t be treated like complete idiots. The one thing running through the James Murray and Ruth Gould case is contempt. They have been treated as criminals,? he added.
Walsh participants such as Caroline Wade from Donegal corroborate Dornan?s criticisms. Wade completed her three years in Colorado Springs along with 15 others — out of a total of 178 young Irish people who started the program in that city.
Wade faulted Northrop Grumman for being unresponsive to the young people?s needs. At the same time, she said, the manner in which participants were checked up felt intrusive.
She said many of the participants were ill-prepared for working life in the U.S., and that at the heart of the program?s flaws lies a culture clash: administrators simply didn?t understand the communities from which the young Irish people came or how they lived their lives.
She further said many of the participants were immature and didn?t take the program seriously.
?You need a selection process,? Wade said, speaking by telephone from the Lake of Shadows Hotel in Buncrana, Co. Donegal, where she is now restaurant manager — ironically one of the program?s success stories.
?It was literally as if they?d just put a whole pile of unemployed people on a plane and flew them to America,? she said, even though participants were given six weeks of training in Ireland before leaving.
?We were in some sense guinea pigs,? she continued. ?A lot of things came up, like we didn?t know what taxes we were supposed to pay.?
A friend of Wade?s and fellow Walsh visa participant Pauric Welch was found dead in Colorado in 2001, in suspicious circumstances — it was later determined that he had committed suicide. On that occasion, Wade said the program?s 24-hour emergency contact number didn?t work and she heard back from Northrop Grumman 12 hours after she had found out that Welch was dead.
?I have no time for Northrop whatsoever,? she said.
A call to program administrator Frederick Welch at Northrop Grumman was not returned.
Another participant, Wade said, ended up living rough in an abandoned caravan. She personally tracked him down and helped prepare him to go home after his family in Belfast started wondering where he had gone.
And a Wexford man, Wade said, was arrested by police on a minor charge and had his wrist broken in custody.
Many of the participants partied hard, she said, and treated the program like a holiday in the U.S.
?After all, we?re coming from a country where it does nothing but rain all day,? Wade said.
In Pittsburgh, an attorney familiar with the Walsh program who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed this point made by Wade.
He said that many of the young participants were simply not capable of rising to the challenge presented by working life in the U.S. — they frequently drank their pay checks in one weekend and had trouble managing their money or living away from home.
Such was the dropout rate at the start of the program, that the Emerald Isle Immigration Center in Queens, N.Y., started a fund for program ?refugees.?
Two Walsh visa participants, Declan Keenan from Newry, Co. Down, and Gerard Toland, from Derry, slept rough in Manhattan?s Central Park after they fled Colorado having been fired from the program — the pair claimed they had been unfairly dismissed.
The new legislation, said the spokesperson for Rep. Walsh, would tackle its initial problems ?and tweak it a little bit.? In particular, the minimum age requirement has been raised to 21 and each participant will now come to the U.S. for two years, not three.
Said Dornan: ?The State Department and the program administrators could have and should have engaged in serious negotiations with the Irish immigration centers. The centers have years of experience. The administrators had zero.?
He added that a central plank of the program was to bring disadvantaged Protestants and Catholics together in the U.S. where they had the chance to live and work together. However, little was done by the program administrators to reach out to Protestant communities, which are traditionally deeply suspicious of the United States? Irish-American communities and of reconciliation attempts in general.
Asked about the changes being made to the program, Dornan said that it has failed on many levels. Young Irish people continue to come to the U.S. from Ireland?s most disadvantaged counties and choose the undocumented route where they make more money and have greater job flexibility than the Walsh Visa program affords its participants.
?This is the travesty of the situation. Every undocumented Irish person who has been in the U.S. since the program started in late 2000, they didn?t have to be undocumented if the Walsh Visa program had been made more suitable to their needs,? he said.

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