Political debate in France, Italy and the UK is currently roiled by the immigration question. Here, by contrast, the recent announcement by Helen McEntee, the justice minister, that an amnesty is being granted to thousands of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants has attracted little comment. Either people don’t know about it or they just don’t care.
In France, by contrast, public opinion has hardened so much against immigration that even the urbane Michel Barnier, a hero for Ireland during the tortuous Brexit negotiations, has declared it is “out of control”. It was the latest in a series of such statements he has made.
Barnier was hoping to become the candidate for les Républicains in next year’s presidential election. He proposed a moratorium on immigration to allow France, and the European Union as a whole, to take stock of the situation on the union’s borders. Clearly, he had immigration from Muslim countries chiefly in mind. Barnier told French TV: “There are links between [migration flows] and terrorist networks which try to infiltrate them.”
In the end, Valerie Pecresse won the centre-right party’s nomination and she has promised to increase “domestic security and combat Islamic extremism”. Pecresse knows that if she does not sound tough on the issue, she will be outflanked on the right by Marine Le Pen of the National Rally and by the ultra-hardline Éric Zemmour.
A journalist and polemicist, Zemmour has called his party Reconquête, meaning “recapture”. It is a deliberately provocative reminder of the Spanish Reconquista, which drove Muslims from Spain in the 15th century.
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Mercifully, we are light years from having this sort of debate in Ireland, perhaps because we have had no jihad-inspired terrorist attacks. It could be a different story otherwise.
The McEntee amnesty is a humane gesture and justified in the current Irish context. Announcing it, she said: “It will bring some much-needed certainty and peace of mind to thousands of people who are already living here and making a valuable contribution to our society and the economy, many of whom may be vulnerable due to their current immigration circumstances.”
From January, undocumented immigrants have six months in which to apply to regularise their situation. The Department of Health does not know how many will come forward. In a footnote to the press release announcing the amnesty, there is a reference to “studies” putting the number at 17,000. When the online magazine Gript asked the department for links to those studies, it could not point to any. So it sounds as though 17,000 is an educated guess. The figure could be more, it could be less. Not a great way to make policy.
While the amnesty is defensible, questions still need to be asked about it, and about immigration policy generally. We can do nothing about EU nationals coming to live and work in Ireland, but we can, if we want, restrict the numbers coming from outside the EU. If the numbers of migrants are unsustainably high, then we should reduce them; and if they are too low, then we ought to increase them.
An indication that they might be too high would be if they put too much additional strain on schools, hospitals and housing, or were perhaps to drive down wages in low-paid jobs. On the other hand, if certain sectors of the economy are short of workers, that is a clear argument for increasing immigration from outside the EU.
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There is also the question of integration and social stability. If immigrants are not integrating properly and social unrest and tensions are increasing as a result, as they are in France, it may be necessary to press the pause button.
Given its position on the edge of Europe, Ireland does not have to worry about how to handle the big flow of immigrants coming across the Mediterranean or Aegean seas. We are not dealing with thousands of asylum seekers on our borders as Poland currently is, with Belarus using unfortunate people as pawns in its political battle with the EU.
No one is risking their life to cross the Irish Sea to get here, unlike those in France, who are willing to risk drowning in order to cross the English Channel, even though they are already safe from whatever it is they fled,
Pope Francis has again weighed in on the debate. Last weekend he paid a visit to the Greek island of Lesbos, where several thousand asylum seekers await processing and are caught in limbo. The Pope denounced politicians who take advantage of public fears about immigration. Presumably he meant people such as Zemmour. He called the treatment of migrants “the shipwreck of civilisation”.
Yet the Pope does not favour open borders. In remarks to journalists when returning from Sweden in 2016, he said, in effect, that a country should not accept more refugees than it could integrate.
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While the McEntee amnesty did not receive much attention, another not unrelated story received even less, namely the drop in the number of babies being born here. Last year it was predicted that lockdown would result in a baby boom. Nothing of the sort happened. Comparing the first quarter of this year with the same period last year, births declined by 3.3 per cent.
In the second quarter of 2021 there was an almost 15 per cent drop in the number of births compared with the equivalent quarter in 2020. That amounts to almost 2,000 fewer babies. In 2019, before the pandemic hit, Ireland’s fertility rate was down to 1.7 children per couple, well below the replacement level of 2.1.
Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla, told a Wall Street Journal conference on Monday that, contrary to popular belief, the problem facing humanity isn’t that we are having too many children, but too few. Musk, who has six, sees the “birth dearth” as one of the greatest threats to our future.
Ireland needs to have a proper debate about this. Perhaps, having done so, we will decide we don’t care that we are having too few babies and that our population is ageing rapidly. If this is the outcome, then the only answer is a lot more immigration, because we are going to have to get young workers from somewhere. If it also means that amnesties become commonplace in the future, so be it.
