A woman sees herself through a lengthy stay in immigration limbo with help from open mics, group therapy

On a recent Tuesday evening, the dingy basement of Pawn Shop, the bar on Dame Street, was crowded and bustling.

Nervous comics were huddling in the back, studying their material. It was a comedy open mic – but there was no microphone in sight. 

Participants had to fill the room with their own voices. At one point, the roar of a vacuum cleaner out the door swallowed some half-baked jokes. 

Jaishree Malik sat at a table chatting and laughing heartily. She was wearing a pink jumper. Black curly hair framed her smile. 

When the emcee called her up on stage to do a five-minute set, she flew into a routine all about an eight-month-long limbo looming over life.

That’s how long she’s been waiting for a decision on her request for a few more months on an expired graduate immigration stamp 1G, so she can apply for a work permit and steady her status. 

“Most men process their feelings faster,” Malik said, on stage, of her eight-month-long wait. The joke met with peals of laughter. 

“I have a joke about how if pregnancy is nine months, I could have almost had a child by now,” she’d said that morning, sitting at a city centre café, nibbling on a pastry.

Malik is not a comedian. She used to work at Trinity College Dublin’s law school as an event organiser before all this. “So, conferences, seminars, workshops, that sort of thing,” she said. 

Immigration solicitor Imran Khurshid has said that until mid-2025, requests for more time on a 1G stamp for some non-EU graduates of Irish universities – who have paid thousands of euros to study here – were processed faster than they are now, and were viewed with understanding by the Department of Justice.

But in the past year, he’s noticed a pivot, he said. People wait much longer, dip into their savings, grapple with poverty, and are often rejected, he said. 

For Malik, the eight months of limbo, the sense of being here – grocery shopping, paying rent, meeting up with friends – but also shut out, that her life is reduced to a possibility, highlights the absurdity of immigrant life, she said. 

As her days of idleness have stretched into months, she has tried to rise above the uncertainty by talking about it in group therapy. 

And at night, she sometimes jokes about the ordeal in comedy clubs. “It is funny. I mean, it’s very very Beckett, it’s very Waiting for Godot,” said Malik.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said its Immigration Service Delivery unit aims to process applications as fast as possible, but a myriad of factors – like the number of cases at hand, their complexities, the need for more information – can stymie its efforts, they said. 

It understands how frustrating the wait can be, the spokesperson said. 

So close and yet so far

Right now, said the spokesperson for the Department of Justice, it’s reviewing “extension of student conditions” cases submitted in October. That’s when Malik filed hers. 

There are about 2,700 applications on hand, they said.

Not every student from outside of the European Economic Area (EEA) is eligible for a graduate immigration stamp after their studies wrap up. 

It’s introduced for people who have graduated from often expensive, high-quality bachelor's, master’s and PhD courses. 

Those who have finished an undergraduate course at Level 8 have one year to look for a job and a work permit sponsor. Master’s and PhD graduates have two. 

Malik has already found a sponsor, who can apply when she has a valid short-term Irish Residence Permit (IRP), she said. She can also accept the job offer and start working on the extension as she waits for her work permit to come through.

But the Department of Employment normally rejects work permit requests from people who apply without an active IRP. 

The Department of Justice had also previously said that those waiting on a decision on an extension request can’t keep working for up to 12 weeks after their IRP runs out.

That policy only applies to people who are renewing an expired permit, they had said.

Malik said she’d been working part-time while a student – and full-time after – in TCD, paying taxes and contributing the whole time. 

Before taking up the job at its law school, “I was working with the global office. I was the student support officer. I was working directly with students as they were figuring out international exchange and study abroad,” said Malik. 

Tough luck 

The Department of Justice’s statement seems to suggest Malik has been wasting her time navigating the limbo, for the past eight months.

Needing more time to apply for a work permit, they said, is no reason to stretch out an expired graduate stamp.

That pathway “is intended for unforeseen or unusual circumstances”, the spokesperson said.

Back in February, Khurshid, the immigration solicitor, said that doesn’t exactly line up with his experience of applying for clients in the past.

He said the Department used to grant a few more months to his clients without any exceptional reason, unless they’d run-ins with the law here. 

Ivana Bacik, Labour Party TD and its leader, to whom Malik had turned to for help, said people reach out to her office a lot about processing delays of immigration applications generally, these days.

As for extension applications, “it is particularly difficult for young graduates, who in many cases are waiting to take up job offers,” she said.

It’s really unfair for people who play by the rules, “and submit their applications in good time, only to be left in limbo due to institutional delays,” said Bacik. 

Malik had applied for an extension about two months before her IRP expired, she said.  

Bacik has heard from people who lost job opportunities, she said, missed a family funeral, and “experienced great distress” and became “technically undocumented”. 

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has hardened its immigration rules in a bid to slow population growth, said the Minister for Justice, Fianna Fáil’s Jim O’Callaghan TD, last year.

Bacik said she and her party, "unequivocally" condemn “the Government's rightward shift in tone and policy”.

It’s showing less and less flexibility to immigrants who follow its rules “yet the Department is showing itself immense latitude for its own administrative failing and mishaps”, she said.

Shashank Chakerwarti, a peace commissioner in Dublin, who’s been campaigning on behalf of graduates like Malik for the past several months, also said he’s worried about just how devastating the impact of a prolonged wait on graduates like Malik can be.

It can be a dangerous undertow, pulling people into poverty and “informal employment and exploitation”, he said.

I try to laugh about it

At the recent open mic night on Dame Street, Malik joked about her experience of helping students – in her old job – who weren’t from the fringes of the world and moved with such abandon. 

Like they didn’t sense the pressure of needing any reason to leave their place of birth, except that a feeling overcame them, she said.

When she told an American guy he probably needs a visa to move here and study, “He goes, ‘Huh, Mastercard should work’”, she joked on stage.

The audience laughed.

One liberating facet of telling jokes at open mics, she said that morning, is not having to invent herself for a job that qualifies for a work permit. 

And in a parallel universe, she could be a comedian, a writer, a filmmaker here, Malik said, like an EU citizen could if that’s what they wanted.

Besides dabbling in comedy, these days, she’s been throwing community events for job seekers so people can come together and help one another apply for work. “Because job-hunting can be so isolating otherwise,” said Malik.

But it feels weird not being able to work, she said. And of course, the government misses out on the taxes she could’ve paid, said Malik, who’s paying off a student loan that she’d taken in India on top of paying rent here.

At one point, she said, if the government isn’t keen to grant extension requests from people like her, it should probably just remove it as an option.

“Make it a policy, declare it,” she said.

“What [the Minister for Justice] is doing now he’s setting precedent that these applications are going to take six to eight months if not longer, and it’s going to dissuade people from applying even if they meet conditions,” said Malik. 

That feels underhanded, she said.

Meanwhile, Malik, whose set received one of the warmest applauds at the open mic night, has been finding success on stage.

A few nights after the event, she texted to say, “One of the guys at the gig on Tuesday thought I was very funny and asked if I like to perform at his club tonight”.

“I believe they have real mics,” she wrote.