Hands up, I am one of those who from time to time has noted the paucity of official information on aspects of the impact of mass immigration here.
So, when I heard that the esteemed Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) had published two new reports purporting to provide the definitive evidence on the fiscal and social welfare dimensions I was interested.
Some intrepid band of researchers with the sponsorship of the Department of Justice and Migration and presumably with the co-operation and access to detailed and up to date revenue and social welfare statistics had produced the proof that “On average over the last twenty years, foreign-born residents have made a higher fiscal contribution than Irish-born residents.”
It must be so because the mainstream media who had read the press releases and maybe even the Executive Summary of both reports – the one on “the fiscal impact of immigration” and the other on social welfare – has told us it is so.
Well, as we will see, they haven’t actually produced any such evidence.
Let me begin with the report on ‘Social Transfers.’ While the disciples of mass immigration have mostly focused on how immigrants are allegedly paying the way for the rest of us through their tax, they could only imply that immigrants were also footing the bill for the natives on the dole.
The rather limp summary of the social welfare research paper is that “In conclusion, this report does not find any general trend (my italics) that immigrants are more likely than the native-born to receive welfare payments.”
Well, they either are or they are not. Nearly, or ‘no more likely,’ as Heisenberg states in Breaking Bad, didn’t get us to the moon. What happened to the ‘science’ in ‘social science’ people?
I would suggest that immigrants are actually increasingly more likely to be social welfare beneficiaries – and we have official backing for such a conclusion. Namely, that a PQ from Offaly Independent TD Carol Nolan last year extracted the information that more than 30% of those in receipt of Jobseekers Allowance were other than Irish nationality.
Which, if we include persons born overseas who have acquired Irish citizenship, would mean that well over one third of the long term unemployed were not Irish. Unfortunately, and for whatever reason, there appear to have been no updated statistics published since late 2024. I wonder why.
These are the ones cited in the ESRI report and substantiate what Carol Nolan was told and which I had previously discovered in the statistical tables of the Department of Social Protection. So, the report really consists of no more than throwing in ‘regression analyses’ and subjective comment to come to the weak conclusion I quote above.
Now, for the report on the fiscal aspects of immigration. The first clue as to why this is not the ‘definitive album’ is in the title – which is ‘Literature review on the fiscal impact of immigration.’
And in their introduction, the authors proclaim that “In this paper, we review literature on the fiscal impacts of migration to draw conclusions that are relevant to the Irish context.”
They also note that “Although no studies on this topic have focused on Ireland, we review several comparative studies that included Ireland.”
This leaves us none the wiser at all as the ‘literature review’ does not contain any of the in-depth statistical analysis of Irish tax and other revenues that would be necessary to provide the basis for any valid conclusion.
They have not actually pored over Revenue returns and such like to provide us with any of the hard evidence that would support the take that has been channelled to you through a willing media.
Which is that you better not even begin to have any doubts about the benefits of what you can see happening all around you because these guys are the guys who will be paying for your nappies and pensions when you are transferred from the scratcher to the old age pension.
What the literature review does is to take a fairly small selection of reports, including some of the ESRI’s own earlier reviews, and specifically parts that show that in a broad European or international context (via OECD reports including one from 2013) that “broadly speaking” immigration for purposes of seeking work is “broadly positive.”
Anyone familiar with the literature detailing with the impact of immigration will note that there are several sources which the authors clearly do not rate as important as others, and which have provided a rather more nuanced and critical academic analysis of the fiscal impact of immigration.
Among them Van de Beek et al’s 2024 study on the fiscal impact of immigrants in the Netherlands; Ruist’s similar look at Sweden; Chohnicki and others detailed research on the long term negative financial impact of all immigration including intra-EU in France; Hansen et al on the “strongly negative” fiscal costs of non-European immigration. And there are others.
This is not a criticism of the author’s research standards by the way. Any of us who have done academic research based on literature reviews rather than primary research (which is what is required for any credible report on the issues at hand) will know that you have to choose your sources. The authors of the ESRI fiscal report have chosen theirs. Fair enough.
They themselves accept this where for example they state that “A crucial caveat to this research is that assessments of fiscal impact require several methodological decisions that can substantially change the results of the evaluation.”
For example – and these are aspects which they do not take into consideration – are whether to include the costs of “education, pure public goods like flood defences, corporate taxes); whether to look only at a specific period, such as 2015-2020, or to try to estimate how migration will affect public finances decades into the future,” and so on.
And elsewhere: “even assuming that migration leads to a fiscal benefit for the state that offsets the increased demand on services, the state may have difficulty in expanding service provision for other, non-fiscal reasons, such as capacity constraints.”
Above all they note that “Data availability is also a significant challenge to building a comprehensive understanding of how immigration relates to the state’s finances.” Take from that what you will.
What I take is that this report is nowhere near the ‘gotchee’ that all previous and no doubt subsequent official reports on the joys of mass immigration are supposed to be, and will be ever to come.
If the State is serious about examining the actual fiscal and other impacts of immigration then they have the access to the official statistics which the rest of us rarely do unless extracted like a tooth. They ought not be relying on ‘literature reviews.’