Emigration? No, we need to have an honest debate on immigration
IN the last week, two former British home secretaries – David Blunkett and Jack Straw – have admitted that the UK made a big mistake when it opened its borders to eastern European members of the EU back in 2004.
Jack Straw said allowing the migrants in was a ‘spectacular mistake’, describing it as ‘well-intentioned policy we messed up’. His admission came after David Blunkett warned that British cities could face riots as an influx of Roma migrants creates ‘frictions’ with local people.
The fascinating aspect of these comments is that they come from the political Left. The worrying aspect of these comments is that, as we operate a common travel area with Britain, the same open-door policy has been in place here since 2004. With the UK deciding in 2004 to open its borders to citizens of the EU accession states, Ireland had a simple choice: keep the common travel area and follow the same policy as Britain or follow a different policy but at the expense of the common travel area.
Had Ireland then decided not to allow entry to citizens of the EU accession states, we would have had to install controls at the border to implement that decision. That was a deeply unattractive option for any Irish government. But there was one thing which policy-makers could have done at that time to stem the flow of immigration.
They could have tightened up the laws on citizenship.
For Ireland didn’t just face substantial immigration from Eastern Europe, it also faced a substantial flow of asylum seekers, predominantly from Africa. Many heavily pregnant women were then arriving at maternity hospitals, apparently so that their children could be born here and thus qualify for Irish citizenship. That would open the door for the rest of the family.
So, i n 2005, t hen j ustice minister Michael McDowell ( for whom I worked as a special adviser) introduced the Citizenship Referendum. That proposed to change the law so that birth in Ireland would no longer automatically qualify a child for citizenship. The Left was outraged. So too was polite middle-class opinion as represented on the airwaves and newspaper columns.
EVEN someone as traditionalist as Irish Mail On Sunday columnist John Waters predicted that the proposal would be rejected by three to one. In the event, the proposal to restrict the availability of citizenship was carried by a margin of nearly four to one. The evidence is very clear. When Irish citizens were given the chance to express themselves on the matter of citizenship and residence, they opted in overwhelming numbers (and contrary to the middle- class worrywarts) for the more restrictive option. So, as they might ask on the popular BBC quiz show A Question Of Sport, what happened next?
Answer: the flow of foreign nationals into Ireland continued.
Many – with little obvious connection to Ireland other than seeking it as a refuge from lower living standards elsewhere – have been given citizenship. And, following the finan- cial crash, many Irish citizens have had to go in the opposite direction and emigrate.
Some of these developments should not overly worry us. Young Irish people have often emigrated for a time to build up experience abroad with an eventual plan to return home. And many of those who have immigrated here from Eastern Europe are well-qualified and hard workers who contribute to society here.
But some of these developments should worry us. Between the census in 2002 and that held in 2011, the number of non-national residents in the State has grown from 224,000 to 777,000.
Based on these figures, non-nationals have jumped from 6 per cent to 17 per cent of the population in less than a decade. That is a staggering and unsettling rate of change.
These numbers are reflected in the growing pace at which Irish citizenship is being granted under Alan Shatter as Justice Minister. This was made clear in an answer this month to a parliamentary question from Tommy Broughan TD. The number of certificates of naturalisa- tion issued in recent years was approximately 4,600 in 2009, 6,200 in 2010, 10,800 in 2011, 25,100 in 2012 and 23,900 for the first ten months of 2013. Notice a rising trend there?
When we look at the most up-to-date CSO statistics about immigration they also reveal a concerning trend. According to the most recent Quarterly National Household Survey, there were 7,500 fewer Irish people living in the State at the end of June than one year earlier. And there were 6,500 more people resident here from outside the EU.
The danger is that too fast a pace of i mmigration may spark an unpleasant reaction from the natives – that’s us. To date, evidence of racist reaction has been thankfully sporadic. But, in August of this year, the Immigrant Council of Ireland stated that reported incidents of racism in the Republic had more than doubled in the previous 12 months. And racism has been an ugly feature of other high-immigration states in Europe. So we need to be careful. Another reason why such a rapid growth in the number of non-nationals should concern us i s that increased immigration and diversity reduce trust, social solidarity, and social capital. As Robert Putnam, political scientist and Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, has stated: ‘The short run effect of being around people who are different from us is to make all of us uncertain – to hunker down, to pull in, to trust everybody less.’
Is it just a coincidence that the social safety net is far smaller in the racially diverse US than in the more racially similar societies of western Europe? Is it a coincidence that an extension of that net – the Obamacare system of universal health insurance – has met with virulent political opposition from the (almost completely white) Tea Party?
THE bottom line is that the Irish people voted clearly for one policy. But, in terms of what has actually happened, we got almost the complete opposite. We cannot undo the past. So we must work to integrate those who are legally here – it is in their interests and it is in our interests.
However, we need to dramatically reduce the flow of non-nationals into Ireland, especially at a time when our young people are finding it so hard to find employment. That would mean much more aggressive deportation of those EU citizens who come here to avail of our welfare system. It would mean an investigation of whether there is health tourism to Ireland to avail of free treatment – this is costing the UK an estimated £2billion annually. It would mean making life significantly more difficult for asylum seekers who l and here with no identity documents or plausible explanation for how they got here.
It would mean suggesting that families who want to be reunited can do so in their country of origin, not here. And it would mean slowing down granting of citizenship to those whose original asylum applications we considered suspect.
All this would bring cries of political protest from the same Labour Party which so vigorously opposed the 2005 Citizenship Referendum.
Unlike the British Labour party, the Irish Labour Party has not yet learned the hard political lessons of rampant immigration. For, unlike its British counterpart, the Irish Labour Party has become a predominantly middle- class party with middle-class concerns.