The United Kingdom and Ireland are different countries with different political cultures. Just how different might be summed up in the following quote from Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and leader of the centre-left Labour Party, in his big speech yesterday about immigration:
“Starmer said that without controls on immigration “we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together”.
He said the immigration system is “almost designed to permit abuse”.
It encourages some businesses to bring in lower paid workers rather than invest in our young people, he said.
It is also “sold by politicians to the British people on an entirely false premise”, he said.”
In Ireland, while things have shifted somewhat over the past eighteen months, it is still entirely inconceivable to imagine the leader of a centre-left party speaking like that. In fact, it is barely imaginable that the leader of a centrist party could speak like that, since the centre-left would assuredly denounce the remarks as racist, if not outright fascist.
Nevertheless, Sir Keir has signalled what he hopes voters will take to be a sea-change in UK migration policy: A plan that he clearly intends will put net inward migration into the UK into a steep decline over the three and a half years before the King is obliged to dissolve parliament and put the Labour Government’s record to the voters.
This is all happening, by the way, because of Reform UK: Nigel Farage has spent a career influencing UK Governments without actually holding power himself, and he has just repeated the trick: The Reform UK wave in the local elections last week has been followed, like morning after night, with a sharp swing to the right on migration by the Labour Government. Notable too is that it is very likely that Starmer’s speech was written by an Irish leftie: Corkman Morgan McSweeney has been Starmer’s chief advisor for years. So at least one Irish progressive has had a come to Jesus moment on immigration. There’s hope for the rest of them yet.
Of course, this new UK policy is likely to be bad news for Ireland. Why? Because this country shares a land border with the UK in the first instance, and essentially unrestricted air and sea travel in the second.
Here are just some of the measures Starmer announced:
They include plans to raise foreign workers’ skills requirements to degree level, raise the standards of English language required for all types of visa including dependents, and increase the time it takes to gain citizenship from five years to as many as 10.
Migrants who demonstrate a “contribution” to the economy and society through their tax returns, who work for the NHS and other public services, who have engineering jobs or who do outstanding voluntary service will be entitled to fast-track their permanent residency.
Care homes will be barred from recruiting staff overseas and bringing them to the UK from later this year. They will instead be required to hire British staff or foreign workers who are already in the UK.
Any foreign national who commits any type of offence could be barred from the UK under changes that mean the Home Office will be informed of all crimes committed by migrants, rather than only those meriting a jail sentence.
Judges’ powers to block deportations will also be curbed.
The basically obvious point here – something so obvious that one assumes even the Irish Government can get it – is that the harder it becomes to immigrate into the United Kingdom, the more attractive Ireland becomes in relative terms. We offer almost all of the advantages of the UK from a cultural and language point of view, and will now de facto offer much more generous terms of welcome. What’s more, getting here from the UK is very very easy. The land border with the United Kingdom is already the source of a clear majority of the southern state’s inward migrant flow, judging by the number of first asylum applications made at the immigration office in Dublin City centre compared to those at the airports and seaports.
It is a racing certainty, therefore, that if Sir Keir succeeds in driving down inward migration to the UK, he will in the process drive up inward migration to Ireland.
The Irish Government is of course not obliged to follow laws made in London – that is presumably why we spilled all that blood a century ago – but issues like this do tend to highlight the functional limits of independence: The UK remains a larger and more powerful economy, and its domestic decisions continue to have enormous bearing on life in Ireland.
Were I running the Republic, my view would be that the Irish Government should always seek in the present circumstances to have a more restrictive migration policy than that which is enacted in London, to benefit from migrant flows in the opposite direction. We should be relatively less attractive than they are, in circumstances where both countries are experiencing more demand to access our borders than we would ideally like.
But unless there is a swift response from Dublin, the opposite will now be the case. So it’s ironic in a way that a Cork-born left winger was behind the Starmer speech and presumably much of the policy. Even when they’re not in Ireland, they’re working to increase immigration to Ireland.