L’idea che l’immigrazione stia alimentando la crisi abitativa potrebbe sembrare un buon senso, ma è sbagliato
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025/04/28/the-idea-that-immigration-fuels-our-housing-crisis-might-seem-intuitive-but-its-wrong/
di The_GoodLuck_Bear
31 commenti
It’s a very complicated issue but is it common sense that if you increase demand (bring in more people) while the supply is the same (still building barely any houses) the housing crisis will get worse.
He doesn’t explain how it’s wrong and then none of his immigrant v Irish stats control for the other massive variables (age, socio-economic status).
You can argue the extent to which it affects it but to say it’s no factor at all is simply dishonest.
Ridiculous argument, and completely untrue in my experience. Just because ‘foreingers’ don’t own houses, the influx has fuelled the rental sector.
I work for a large international company with a small footprint in Ireland. About 60 people. The senior people in the company tend to come in on delegations. About 10 or so if the senior staff are delegates. Each one of these 10 has a house rented on their behalf.
My parents/in laws have inherited properties, along with their siblings, through wills over the last couple of years, in a central locations. Each of these 3 properties is rented to foreign workers as it is the most financially sensible thing to do from their perspective.
Where I am living I am bordered by two rental properties, owned by a local builder and mechanic. They rent these properties out. In my time living here
(10 years) It has always been foreigners occupying these properties. Germany, Italian, french, north African and Indian.
Meanwhile I have a brother, 34, single and still living at home, with no real hope of getting out.
I have a sister in Dublin, 36, who has been renting a room in a house for the last 10 years, with 200k in the bank and can’t get in the ladder. She is consistently being outbid by Chinese , Indians and faceless corporations and housing bodies
CSO Statistics
Number of immigrants to Ireland between 2012-2022 = 401,433
Number of immigrants to Ireland in 2023 = 141,600
Number of immigrants to Ireland in 2024 = 149,200
**Total since 2012 = 692,233.** That’s the same as the entire population of County Galway + population of County Meath + population of County Kildare.
We have taken in around 4 immigrants for every house built in Ireland over the last 12yrs.
How can anybody possibly come to the conclusion that this is not having a negative impact on housing?.
You know whoever wrote this article doesn’t rent.
Have seen this article a few times today. Unfortunately the author doesn’t consider a few things, like the age groups of home owners for one.
They also seem to suggest people are upset when foreigners come here to buy homes. Yet the vast majority of anti foreigner sentiment is usually based around the (often false) perception that foreigners are coming here for handouts and free houses. The author fails to understand this or if they do, fails to address it and instead tried to take a “you don’t have it is bad as foreigners so stop complaining” kind of vibe that serves nobody and only acts as fuel to further the divide between Irish and non Irish.
>The idea that reducing immigration is the only way to solve the housing crisis
14 words in and it was enough to stopped reading, this is just terrible journalism, create a narrative that does not exist (no person with half a brain thinks stopping immigration is the ONLY WAY to solve the problem) and then they probably go about debunking their own stupid narrative.
No body thinks stopping all drink driving would stop all car accidents but it doesn’t mean drink driving shouldn’t be discussed as an issue in the wider problem of car accidents.
This is a bad argument.
His premise at the start is that immigration isn’t fuelling the housing crisis.
Then he goes onto point out how immigrants are worse affected by the housing crisis.
Those are two different things. His ultimate point is that immigration cannot be making the housing crisis worse if immigrants are suffering more from the housing crisis. But it absolutely can be the case that both can be true.
If anything, all this article achieves to me is to add further evidence to my observation that many pro-immigration advocates aren’t willing to make clear rational arguments because they know that the actual statistics prove them wrong. As a result, they try rely on weak arguments that obfuscate the debate in the hopes that people are stupid enough to not see through them.
Edit: On reading it again, I wouldn’t be surprised if some editor changed the headline without properly reading the article. Irish Times opinion section editors have made [bigger cock-ups before while trying to stoke up an identity politics debate](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/may/14/irish-times-apologises-for-hoax-ai-article-about-womens-use-of-fake-tan), so I wouldn’t be surprised at all.
The headline is somewhat misrepresenting the content of the article, as what he _actually_ argues is that:
– Immigrants are disproportionately impacted by the housing crisis, and are to a large extent competing with each other for accomodation rather than out-competing Irish people.
– _The idea that opposition to immigration in Ireland is driven by this kind of competition_ might seem like common sense but doesn’t hold.
– If anti-immigration activists were actually motivated by housing concerns their focus would be on immigrants from the UK (the only group of immigrants who have high home ownership) or high-education professionals from countries like Sweden, whereas instead they focus on asylum seekers who aren’t competing in the housing market.
It’s not the main cause for sure
But it also does not have zero impact
There is no one cause or fault leading to the housing crisis. It is dozens of things working together
Everyone knows that prices are determined by Supply and…uh I forget the other one, sorry
We have had year on year record population increase numbers due to immigration over the last few years during a housing crisis. Yes it’s obvious immigration is exacerbating the housing crisis!
“Population growing at four times the rate new homes are being built”
“Irish population rose by record 3.5% last year, says European Commission”
https://m.independent.ie/business/personal-finance/revealed-population-growing-at-four-times-the-rate-new-homes-are-being-built/a1593048308.html
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/social-affairs/2024/06/10/european-commission-says-irish-population-rose-by-record-35-per-cent-last-year/
This is just sheer gaslighting, and reminds me of that Atlantic article that lamented that the way we talk about housing is so different from any other good or service, and results in so much agenda-motivated magical thinking.
“Part of the apple shortage problem is increasing demand for apples, and slowing the growth of such demand would ameliorate the situation” – everyone would accept this. No controversy. Supply and demand.
“Part of the housing shortage problem is increasing demand for housing, and slowing the growth of such demand would ameliorate the situation” – absolutely not, demand has nothing to do with it, we should have been planning for this increased demand 20 years ago, you’re scapegoating real human beings, etc etc
The article does not even attempt to prove the headline, just pivots to saying that actually, immigrants are victims of the lack of housing too, and at greater rates than Irish citizens. Which is an entirely different point to make as to whether the current rates of immigration are a significant factor in the crisis.
Anyway, the actually salient part of the article:
“True, housing supply has been inadequate for over a decade, and by historic standards immigration is indeed high. In 2023, 22 per cent of the population were born outside the State. Only two other EU countries had a higher level of foreign-born population – Malta and Cyprus – which are of course Mediterranean islands.”
Immigration levels are too high.
Dr Byrne is a bit of a plonker.
He doesn’t mention outward migration of Irish born folks.
He seems to suggest that if the housing crisis sucks for immigrants, it is therefore peachy for non-immigrants. Actually, it sucks for everyone.
I don’t want immigrants burned out or assaulted or murdered. I want everyone in ireland to thrive with good quality of life. That is misrepresented as being far-right.
But I do think that immigration numbers need to be controlled and needs to be linked to last year’s house building. The government have not increased building and appear to have no control of immigration numbers.
Clearly the goverment and there pals in the media are worried that people are doing basic maths to see the correlation between migration and the housing crisis
The article actually doesn’t back up the claim in the heading at all.
The author simply says that immigrants have a lower rate of home ownership, and are more impacted by a housing shortage than native or local people.
Okay, and?
Very weak article.
The root of the housing crisis is the government not immigration
Immigration isn’t causing the housing crisis, but it is a factor.
Without net inward migration, there’s a fairly hard limit on how fast the population can grow. Currently, I think it’s below replacement rate (2.1 children per woman), it’s around 1.7 and even that is pretty high for the EU.
So, migration is setting a fast-moving target for housing and that’s a concern.
BUT – that’s not the whole story either. There’s a lot of immigrant workers who are working fairly hard jobs and long hours (delivery, courier, taxi drivers, manual labour/construction) that do a lot to keep inflation down. Definitely any time I walk by any of the major public works around the city, I hear a lot more non-Irish accents than Irish. Considering we’re near full employment, this is a REALLY good thing.
> Dr Michael Byrne is a lecturer at UCD and director of the Equality Studies MSc.
Comedy gold.
I would say it’s one of many factors. But immigration policy is the issue and NOT the immigrants themselves.
This article didn’t prove that immigration wasn’t fuelling the housing crisis? All it shows is that the housing crisis also affects immigrants (I am not sure anyone would claim that it didn’t). That is obviously but irrelevant to the headline.
The population increased does it matter how if it people coming to this country or people staying in this country, we need people to do the work. Heck even the builders would collapse if they didn’t have foreign workers. We have known for decades that the population was going to increase but there was no uptick in building more housing, no increase in planning for better urban environments, no improvement for local services where more housing was needed. They kept hoping they had more time and cover for the tough decisions that were needed but the drug of rising property value was too tough to give up.
Btw I don’t actually think the article addresses any sort of issue, it just waffles on about inequality. I actually think a whole less of equality studies after reading such a poorly written article.
>The argument that reducing immigration would alleviate the housing crisis therefore appeals to common sense. But what it misses is that it is immigrants themselves who are overwhelmingly the victims of the housing crisis. By any measure, immigrants come out much worse than Irish-born households.
This is his core argument, but it doesn’t make sense. Irish people who are homeless or are paying a massive % of their wages to rent a home are not any better off just because immigrants as a whole are worse off.
If anything, the numbers showing that only 23% of Irish people are renting vs 63% of non-Irish born would suggest that the bulk of rental competition is from immigrants.
Rubbish, When you’ve people who come into the country and are say refugees and so on, where are they going to live eventually? Are they going to buy their own home? Unlikely, so they’ll go onto an already stressed social housing list which competes with low wageworkers and others from working class areas.
Anyone suggesting it doesn’t play a part is lying.
Simplest economics: Increased competition for *any* finite resource, be it housing, trading cards or anything else raises prices on that item. Supply and demand.
The idea that gasoline is fuelling the fire might seem like common sense, but it’s wrong
Literally no points to support their claim in the article that 3.5% population growth a year doesn’t effect housing demand and availability supply.
There needs to be a study conducted on why people are so invested in spreading the lie that immigration has no impact on anything ever.
Let’s ask Grok 🙂
*Ireland’s housing crisis is driven by a severe shortage of homes due to decades of underinvestment, a post-2008 construction collapse, and complex planning barriers.*
*Government policies favouring private markets over social housing, coupled with the financialization of property by vulture funds and global investors, have inflated prices and rents.*
*High demand from population growth and changing demographics exacerbates the issue, while tight mortgage rules and stagnant wages lock many out of home ownership.*
*Short-term rentals like Airbnb reduce rental stock, and infrastructure deficits hinder new builds.*
*Successive governments’ market-driven approaches and ineffective plans have prioritised profit over public need, entrenching the crisis.*
Immigration is definitely a scapegoat – and also definitely a contributor to the problem – and also definitely the _solution_ to the problem (immigration of workers building housing).
The sole _root_ cause of the Housing Crisis, is that it is deliberate policy – any other cause is secondary/tertiary at best.
I blame all the people having babies. Complete lay-abouts who contribute nothing to society for 18 years and cost the state a fortune. When they come here UN-VETTED, they have NO documents, no jobs lined up, no skills and just expect handouts while the rest of us all have to work and pay TAXES!
Send them all back to where the came from I say the lazy feckers.
The conclusion the article tries to draw makes absolutely no sense
So because immigrants are affected by the crisis they don’t contribute to it? Seriously? That’s the level of analysis the Irish Times have to offer? Woeful
It’s simple supple vs demand. More demand; the worse it gets. That doesn’t mean that immigration is the underlying cause, but it undoubtedly is exacerbates the situation