February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Susan Falvella-Garraty and Ray O’Hanlon
WASHINGTON, D.C. — At first glance they looked to some like a charity-tinged political handout: visas for long-term unemployed in Northern Ireland and the border counties of the Republic as a reward for peace.
But the Irish Peace Process Cultural and Training Program Act, the initiative that gave birth to the so-called Walsh Visas, has recently developed a hard economic edge. U.S. companies are clamoring for Walsh Visa winners. So much so that the program is having difficulty in getting the visa holders across the Atlantic fast enough.
The first 77 participants in the Walsh Visa program got their first American hospitality during a warm welcome from the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C., last week.
The 77, effectively the advance guard of up to 12,000 eventual visa holders, spent their first hours on U.S. soil getting acquainted with their new homes in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. Forty-five members of the group came from the North, while 32 came from six border area counties of the Republic.
They had a pizza party, and even did a bit of shopping at one of the area’s premier malls. But then it was down to business. In remarks at the welcoming ceremony on Monday, April 3, officials involved with the program explained the importance of the opportunity to gain employment experience and specialized training during their stay in the U.S. By Wednesday of last week, the members of the advance were due to begin work, is some case for the first time in their lives.
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The Walsh Visa program is scheduled to last three years. It is designed to help those who require assistance with job skills and is calculated to foster better conflict resolution abilities.
Temporary non-immigrant status is conferred on qualified candidates who participate in training and employment at such companies as the Marriott Corporation, Metrocall paging services, and an online shopping service called Streamline.com.
Sean McGarry, Northern Ireland’s employment and training agency, captured the mood at the State Department ceremony. "Go for it," he told the participants in his remarks in the department’s auditorium.
Rep. Jim Walsh, who once worked as a Peace Corps volunteer, described the first arrivals as "pioneers" who would someday return to Ireland where they would economically energize their home regions while helping break down sectarian barriers.
Up to 4,000 men and women between the ages of 18 and 35 who live in the designated areas that are prone to long-term unemployment can enter the program in the first year. The participants must have job offers certified by the visa program before they enter the U.S. and they may work here for up to 36 months.
Before the scheduled ending of the program, at the end of 2005, those completing the program’s work in the U.S. will also be assisted in finding jobs in their new fields of endeavor back in Ireland.
The Walsh program is "hub-specific." As such, different groups of arriving visa holders will be assigned to different cities, states or regions.
According to John Simmons, legislative and appropriations assistant to Rep. Walsh, a Republican from Syracuse, about 400 more Walsh Visa holders are expected to arrive in the U.S. in the next couple of months.
Simmons stressed that interest in the Irish visa holders is now being expressed right across the country.
"We’ve been contacted by the likes of Dell Computer in Austin and Dallas, Texas, while the Broadmoor resort in Colorado Springs has also expressed an interest in hiring Walsh Visa holders," Simmons said.
"There is growing interest. These and other companies want to get their hands on a bunch of these folks. And the kind of jobs to which visa holders are being assigned are those for which there is a labor shortage in the country right now."
Simmons said Walsh was hopeful that visa-hubs would be established in cities such as New York and Boston as soon as possible.
"But we don’t want all the visa holders to end up in big cities. There’s more to the U.S. than that. We would like to get some of them to come work in Syracuse and other smaller urban areas too," Simmons said.