Fifteen days ago, on May 7th, the Taoiseach said the following:
He said the Government will not “stand for” a situation similar to what occurred on Mount Street again due to humanitarian concerns and respect for the law. Mr Harris said he was “very clear” in his commitment to not see “another Mount Street situation develop” and added that the conversation around migration must not focus solely on accommodation due to the significant strain on services.
As I write this, two weeks later, the number of tents in the new migrant encampment along the Grand Canal – just a five minute walk from the original Mount Street tent city – has increased to over one hundred.
The Government, it must be noted, is doing exactly the opposite to what the Taoiseach said it would do: Far from “not standing for it”, Mr. Harris’s administration is, in fact, standing for it.
In fairness to the Government, this was entirely predictable, even if it was their own fault. The core policy failure of the current coalition on immigration, from day one, has been consistent: That they do not understand the law of incentives. If you are a homeless migrant and you wish to be placed in state accommodation, the rational decision, based on the actions of the Government, is to move to a tent city in an embarrassing part of Dublin, on the basis that Mr. Harris’s words will then compel the Government to house you somewhere.
Indeed, this is the entire problem with the migrant accommodation strategy: The more people that Ireland accommodates, the more the word spreads internationally that Ireland is a safe place whose Government will accommodate you. Thus, more people come to seek accommodation, thus the migrant accommodation crisis deepens.
The irony here is that those of us who think endless migration entirely unwise are able to do the very thing the Government and its supporters ask us to do: Put ourselves in the shoes of a poor migrant. The irony is that this is also the very thing that the Government appears unable to do.
Putting yourself in the shoes of a poor migrant, it is patently obvious that everything the Irish Government has done for years has sent you a message: We provided more generous benefits to migrants than many other EU countries. We deported fewer (if any) than other EU countries. We granted a higher proportion of asylum applications than other EU countries. We booked people hotel rooms, while the French (for example) leave you to make your own way to Calais and promise to look the other way if you journey onwards. Not only that, but we advertised these policies internationally, and in multiple languages.
This is one of the biggest problems with Irish policymaking: Our government, much of the media, and the entirety of the NGO class appears only capable of “putting themselves in the shoes of poor migrants” once those people are already here, and can be safely infantilised and presented as helpless children: Once they are on our shores, they become hopeless charity cases unable to feed, clothe, or wash themselves, and deserving of nothing less than our utmost sympathy.
Yet the truth is that many if not all of these people are rational adults who made their choices and often undertook arduous and challenging journeys to get here. Those who destroyed their travel documents made a rational choice because that choice allows them to exploit a weakness in our immigration system by making them harder to deport. Those who come across the border from Northern Ireland are making a rational choice based on the UK’s relatively (though not much) harsher policy towards migrants. Many of those Ukrainians who chose Ireland rather than France as their new home will have made a rational choice based on the comparatively higher level of financial and housing supports made available in Ireland.
Thus, with the tent cities, the Government is making the same mistakes again: Having set out two weeks ago to make tent cities an unattractive proposition, the Government has instead turned them into the rational choice for any migrant to make. The state, it transpires, is even providing the tents (and then, later providing the destruction of those tents). Moving to a tent city is easy, cheap, and likely to force the Irish Government to house you in a nicer place – which is why we’re now hearing talk of an enormous encampment to be opened in Thornton Hall. This encampment will have hot food, free of charge, and showers, and likely free wi-fi.
How do you get to the top of the queue for accommodation in Thornton Hall? You go and get a free tent and pitch it along the canal.
Perhaps if the Government changed tack, and instead began to arrest and charge people with the crime of criminal trespassing, tent cities would not be as attractive as they are. The irony is that to even consider such an idea, the Government would have to do what they say the rest of us can’t: Put themselves in the shoes of a migrant.