Sarah Harte: Shoddy infrastructure harms our humanitarian obligations
Ukrainian refugees fleeing their home country.
We live in a time of migration. In the past decade, the global refugee crisis has more than doubled. According to UNHCR data, last year more than 1.2% of the global population left their homes through forced migration.
Migration has become a “megatrend”, meaning a long-term driving force that is observable now and will continue to have a global impact in years to come.
Our role in responding to migration involves questions entailing social justice, global equity, as well as pragmatism.
Migration policy is an emotive issue and touches on who we value and why. Often, anxiety about migration can be associated with a fear of change, involving a sense of a loss of identity and power — even when that loss is illusory.
We gain through migrants arriving on our shores, through the circulation of ideas, bringing skills, innovation, and energy. Thanks in part to our migrant communities, Ireland is now a more open, multicultural, and cosmopolitan place.
But as in other European countries, the topic has become a political hot potato.
Over the last 18 months, thousands of Ukrainian refugees have arrived in Ireland. This has put intense pressure on the accommodation system. The Council of Europe statistics from last week estimated that there were 90,360 Ukrainians in Ireland.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has indicated that the State’s ability to accommodate refugees and those seeking international protection is at its limit. He mentioned his pride that Ireland has housed around 100,000 Ukrainians, with 20,000 international protection applicants during that time arriving from elsewhere.
But now we see two proposals that could be viewed as a means of discouraging refugees from coming to Ireland.
First, to limit housing entitlements so that after three months in public housing, Ukrainian refugees would be required to find accommodation in the private rental sector (good luck with that), which would almost certainly lead to increased homelessness.
Secondly, to bring social welfare payments in line with lower payments available in other European countries. This is because many countries do not give refugees full social welfare benefits as we do.
Department of Justice figures suggest that around 30% of first-time temporary protection applications were made elsewhere in the EU, indicating an element of welfare tourism.
Recently, a heated row in the Cabinet over scaling back payments to Ukrainians took place.
Observing the inter-governmental departmental pushing and shoving that has gone on between the Departments of Social Welfare and Justice, it is clear just how potentially contentious these changes would be. Any changes will require a Dáil vote.
Irish Refugee Council chief executive Nick Henderson reportedly said changes to the social welfare rules, which “could be
perceived as a deterrent to try to dissuade people from coming to Ireland”, would be ethically problematic.
It’s not clear what the public thinks of all of this, although a Red C poll of 1,000 voters in May for the indicated that three in four people believed that Ireland was taking in too many refugees.
Any debate on this topic brings hazards. First, there is the messaging to existing migrants. Secondly, there’s a risk of strengthening the hand of the far-right “Ireland for the Indigenous Irish” brigade.
So, should we shut our mouths and not debate this?
We lack a credible far right, unlike say France, Germany, and the Netherlands.
But, you wonder if this may be a short-sighted misconception of what racism and anti-migrant sentiment consists of. Or how quickly that feeling can accelerate and bubble beneath the surface, particularly if we were to go into recession.
This year, the Irish Network Against Racism reported about the worsening atmosphere for “minoritised groups”.
If you plug into what is being said online by members of the migrant community, it quickly becomes clear that racism is an everyday problem for many.
Perceptions of racism are not necessarily determined by fictionalised narratives we tell ourselves (we love to tell ourselves that we’re super friendly), but by the real-life experiences of migrants who have either sought protection here or have come to live here in search of better conditions. It’s this concept we’re very familiar with as Irish people.
Ireland is patently not full. We have just over 71 people per sq km, compared to 434 for England or 522 for the Netherlands.
Housing is the most obvious flashpoint. In the context of Ukrainian refugees, Government officials recently spoke about “equity concerns” concerning Irish and EU citizens and other migrant cohorts.
These equity concerns stem not from the fact of migrants arriving here, but from Government policy over decades which meant we didn’t build affordable houses, or social housing leaving the commercial market and private developers to run the show. We now know the human cost of this.
The recent Department of Housing figures show that, in September, 12,000 people were in emergency accommodation.
It would be naive to think that these homelessness figures wouldn’t impact people’s views.
Or that longer-term internal societal cohesion (and building a functioning multi-cultural co-existence) wouldn’t be damaged by ignoring the fact that swathes of people do not have a roof over their head, living in unsatisfactory, unsustainable situations where their lives are curtailed.
The kind of people more liable to drift right are those who, unlike many politicians and policymakers, don’t live in an economically insulated world and for whom domestic and external issues, such as migration, are closely connected,
Other countries that failed to take the temperature of people who got left behind paid, depending on your perspective, an obvious price.
Trump was elected by disaffected and forgotten working-class voters, whom the Democrats failed to listen to. They were open to his anti-immigrant trash talk.
The Brexit vote enabled right-wing campaigners to use vitriolic language to mobilise against “foreigners” to carry the vote.
Some of the Leave voters were inherently racist, others were resentful and desperate because they’d been severely neglected by Tory government policy and any change seemed better than the status quo.
Naturally, the solution to combating xenophobia, racism, and anti-migrant feeling is not some highly ironic shutting of our borders. However, concerns around equity must be addressed along with the time bomb of housing.
This means a debate with carefully considered language, especially from politicians who should think before they open their beaks, figuring out how we administer migration in a way that meets our country’s needs while honouring our humanitarian obligations.
No easy balancing act, and one that will get harder, as global migration figures show.
