The latest statistics on newly issued Personal Public Service (PPS) numbers show that Irish citizens continue to be allocated less than one quarter (23.5%) of all new PPS numbers. This compares to 48% in 2013, and just under 52% in 2009.
The number of Ukrainians included among non-nationals is 14.5% so that does not account for most of the trend, which is a long term one, as the proportion of issues to Irish people had already fallen to under 36% in 2019.
The main component of PPS issues to non-Irish nationals are to people travelling here from outside of the EU and EA at over 52%. This accounts for over twice as many as those issued to Irish people. Persons from within the EU and EEA area, including Britain, accounted for 24% of the issues.
While many people issued with PPS numbers here have travelled to Ireland to work, that only accounts for a minority of those issued with a public service number. There were 4,717 work permits issued to persons who came to Ireland from outside of the EU and EEA in January this year, but the numbers of PPS numbers issued to people from those countries was more than twice that figure.
While some of that is accounted for family members of people who have been given a job here, a large and increasing proportion goes to people who are claiming to be refugees. The vast bulk of them who – as has been consistently and probably tiresomely at this stage pointed out – are from safe countries.
Indeed, the vast majority of those who have come here from safe countries to claim asylum do not even fit into the category of economic migrants. That is evident in the case of the Algerians who were issued with 313 PPS numbers in January. 193 of them had applied for international protection. Just 3 people from Algeria were issued with work permits in the same month.
Apart from the fact that anyone in Algeria who genuinely does want to come to Ireland to work can do so legitimately and legally, an examination of the comparative statistics for the various categories of people who are issued with PPS numbers highlights a long term discrepancy between that figure and the much smaller numbers who come to Ireland to work or even claim dubiously to be refugees.
In January this year, 90% of people from India who were issued with a new PPS number were issued with a work permit. That compared with just over 1% in the case of Georgians, 46% in the case of Nigerians, and just 34% in the case of Brazilians even though Brazilians are famously celebrated as people who come here to work or study.
Those statistics of course only provide an overall picture and one that has a number of different factors at play. There are small delays in official numbers being issued but the overall proportions are accurate.
What is clear is that most people who come to Ireland from outside of the EU and the EEA do not come here to work.
That provides a rather different perspective in the debate as to the economic benefits or otherwise of mass immigration. Put crudely, the question is whether the tax take from immigrants outweighs the costs in public provision paid for from all tax revenue and state borrowing.
Those costs not only include social welfare and accommodation for the tens of thousands who are financially a burden on the state, but also the vastly increased pressures on housing, transport, education, health service, policing, prison, and so on.
Then there are the huge sums that are soaked up by the thriving NGO sector which has made mass immigration into a nice little earner.
People will perhaps affect to be aghast at the notion that people can be a burden, but sure aren’t the indigenous population being told this all the time? That the only way we will survive is if someone else comes and wipes our bottoms when we are old and does the shopping.
An accurate cost/benefit analysis of all of this would actually be interesting.
So would a deeper examination of the nature of the Irish economy which might look at whether the way in which it is currently structured has tied this country into a system – over which no Irish government has any meaningful say – which has radically altered the nature of the country, and which if the trends continue will have transformed it beyond all recognition within another generation.