Those who tuned into Gavan Reilly’s “On the Record” on Newstalk over the weekend were treated to some very controversial comments from the Minister for Housing, Darragh O’Brien. After all, like most people who pay attention to the Irish media, I thought this kind of thing was universally agreed to be a dangerous far-right trope:
Darragh O'Brien tells #OnTheRecordNT that recent rises in homelessness are partly driven by economic migrants from "EEA and non-EEA", not to claim asylum, who are arriving in Ireland without accommodation @NewstalkFM @VirginMediaNews
— Gavan Reilly (@gavreilly) May 1, 2022
That immigration impacts the level of demand for housing is not, of course, a controversial statement. Or at least, it shouldn’t be. It is, after all, just maths. The more people who live in a country, the more dwellings that country requires. The more people competing for those dwellings, the higher the market price of each will be. If your population increases faster than the number of homes you can build, then the demand for homes will go up, and the supply of homes relative to the population will go down. This is very basic mathematics and economics.
This does not mean that immigration is always bad. Managed well, immigration can increase the skill level in an economy, and make everybody in that economy better off. Look no further than the United States for evidence of that one: For centuries they’ve been drawing talented immigrants from Europe and the rest of the world, and the result is that they’ve got the largest economy in the world and are a superpower. Nobody sensible in Ireland, for example, should oppose the immigration of trained doctors or nurses. We need them.
But at the same time, unlimited immigration is a transparently terrible idea. Consider the fact, for example, that we’ve all just filled out a census form. That census form’s primary purpose is to inform policymakers about the required infrastructure that the country will need over the next few decades. A town in Cork with an unusually high number of small children may need a secondary school. A town in Cavan with an unusually high number of people in their 50s may need a new nursing home.
But the problem with unlimited immigration is that it makes those projections meaningless: Planning to build 30k houses a year for the next 20 years will make little difference to the housing crisis if our overall population is growing by 70,000, and if a big chunk of that population growth comes from immigration. That’s why managed immigration is a sensible idea.
With managed immigration, for example, you can say that Ireland plans to admit a set number of migrants each year, whatever that number might be. You can then factor those numbers into your planning.
Ireland does not have a managed immigration policy. Ask a government minister – or indeed any politician in the mainstream – what the maximum number of migrants Ireland can accommodate in a year is, and you’ll get something between a blank stare, and a cold sweat. If they put a number on it, they fear that they’ll be called racist, or accused of pandering to the far right.
All of this is what makes O’Brien’s comments remarkable. For three reasons.
First, it is ostensibly pathetic for a Government Minister to blame migrants, of all people, for the Government’s policy failures. After all, the migrants themselves are here as a result of Government choices. They are as much a result of Government policy as the decision to only build a certain number of new homes is.
Second, the Government has the tools, if it sees migrant numbers as a problem, to reduce them. We could deport people who have been denied asylum, and streamline that whole process. We could – legally – limit EU migration in a number of ways. We could choose not to grant amnesty to illegal migrants who are here in breach of their visas. There are several other policy tools that Government could use. It chooses not to.
Third, it’s an admission that smearing those who mention immigration as a factor is just that – a smear operation. When the person responsible for housing policy admits that migration is a factor in the housing crisis, it is absurd to suggest that anybody else who points to that factor is de-facto a bigot or a racist.
One of the main reasons that we have a Government – aside from security – is to provide the infrastructure and services that the market cannot. They build the schools and the hospitals and the nursing homes and the roads and the prisons. If the Government wants to do that job in such a way that there are not constant capacity crises, then it must know how many people that infrastructure and those services are needed for. We have, in Ireland, a Government that fundamentally refuses to give itself certainty on that point. And all of this before we even discuss any cultural or economic negatives from unlimited immigration.
This is not an illegitimate political issue. In many ways it’s the elephant in the room. And at some point, Irish politicians are going to pay a big price for ignoring it. This is not some unique special country that is immune to the political trends in the rest of the world, as some have suggested.