At a Fianna Fáil “think in” this week, Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan announced proposals to change drastically the laws around immigration and citizenship, by his own account the biggest alteration in “a generation”.

These changes would make the immigration system increasingly punitive in ways that have no clear benefit and seem driven more by a response to international anti-immigration agitation than by clear policymaking.

“I want to see more citizens, but I’m trying to restrain the level of growth in that number,” he said.

My wife is one of those who will be affected: she is not an Irish citizen, but has spent years living and paying taxes in the State. We are moving back to Ireland, having spent some years abroad. So the increase in the number of years of required residency for spouses to become citizens from three to five would affect us personally.

This is far from the most drastic change in the law, however, with the requirement for citizenship outside of marriage rising from five to eight years, applied retrospectively. This would make Irish citizenship under Micheál Martin harder to obtain than United States citizenship under Donald Trump.

This is coming from the same governing parties here that only closed the programme allowing wealthy individuals with no connection to Ireland to purchase residency while spending one day a year in the State in 2023.

Citizenship is still freely given to those who have never resided in the State and, in some cases, whose parents have not either, as long as descent rules were followed and every generation was correctly registered.

Far from encouraging integration, this legislation will further entrench social exclusion of immigrant communities.

O’Callaghan proposes to exclude prospective citizens from accessing aspects of the social welfare system if they wish to apply for citizenship.

Which aspects of the system are unclear: will it include jobseeker’s payments, child benefit and housing assistance payments? Immigrants who are PRSI taxpayers are as entitled to access State supports as any citizen, so excluding them from these systems is a fundamental betrayal of the social contract. It could also potentially expose the State to legal risks.

Even if some of these systems are not included, there is likely to be a chilling effect whereby immigrants avoid interacting with any aspect of State provision for fear of jeopardising their citizenship prospects.

Every punitive step taken to appease a vocal minority will make immigrant communities less likely to trust our teachers, our healthcare workers, our civil servants. If the goal of the immigration system is to integrate people into the fabric of society, this seems a policy tailor-made to produce disenfranchisement and social marginalisation.

These changes are misleadingly presented as merely bringing Ireland into line with European norms. But there is no commonly accepted European norm, with more and less restrictive regimes in place across the Continent. This change would place Ireland among the most restrictive.

More fundamentally, despite our persistent inferiority complex regarding continental Europe, many of these countries, such as France and Belgium, are appalling models for social integration of immigrant communities.

Most disturbing is the proposal to expand the grounds on which the Minister for Justice can revoke naturalised citizenship to include “public order and national security grounds” and the creation of a “streamlined process” to “fast track” such citizenship revocations.

This continues a disquieting worldwide trend of creating two-tier citizenship. To put it bluntly, if one’s citizenship can in effect be removed by fiat, one does not actually have citizenship.

Right now in the US, under Donald Trump and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, the administration is attempting to denaturalise hundreds of people on the grounds of fraud and to remove the visas from others over dissent against government policy. The idea that Ireland should “fast track” or “streamline” such a grave decision is deeply disturbing.

These are solutions in search of a problem. Irish media, to their credit, report on the large citizenship ceremonies that have taken place regularly since 2011. They are a rare feel-good story in a bleak news landscape. People’s stories are warm, sometimes harrowing, often funny. What unites them all is struggle, determination and sacrifice. For one day at least, immigrants are not flat numbers to be made into political attack ads, but real human beings with comprehensible lives.

Now the way that O’Callaghan speaks, one would think that thousands are scamming their way into citizenship for no other reason than to thumb their nose at the Irish taxpayer. The opposite is true. Citizenship is frequently more real to these people than it is to those of us born in Ireland; something precious because it was fought for.

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael appear to be following the worldwide trend of anti-immigration mania, perhaps in the hope it will defuse the explosive social situation that their decades of underinvestment have created.

It takes no courage to scapegoat those without power in society, but it demands a lot to resist the pull of reaction because you know it is morally right and socially sensible to do so. Immigrant communities are criminally underrepresented in Irish electoral politics, so this would be a further step backwards.

These policy proposals appear based more in a desire for Fianna Fáil to recapture conservative votes than to make the immigration system work. But drastic as the proposed changes are, they will not satisfy the voices calling for the demonisation of immigrants.

The British political system has sent itself into paroxysms for decades now over the issue, with each government, Conservative or Labour, further tightening the screws on immigration.

The result has not been a tamping down of tensions but the reverse. Far-right riots are now too commonplace, with gangs of masked men last week at the port of Dover enacting some sort of terrorising street theatre against the “small boats” supposedly menacing that nation. We should ask ourselves if we want that here.

For O’Callaghan, the changes he proposes may provide a temporary bump in personal popularity, it may even catapult him to the leadership of his party and the office of taoiseach.

But for immigrants in Ireland it will mean more years of uncertainty and isolation, more gratuitous punishment for no greater crime than wanting to be Irish.

Jack Sheehan is a freelance writer based in New York