David McWilliams: l’Irlanda ha bisogno di immigrati. E un piano economico per ospitarli
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025/07/12/david-mcwilliams-ireland-needs-immigrants-and-an-economic-plan-to-accommodate-them/
di Dazzling_Lobster3656
David McWilliams: l’Irlanda ha bisogno di immigrati. E un piano economico per ospitarli
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025/07/12/david-mcwilliams-ireland-needs-immigrants-and-an-economic-plan-to-accommodate-them/
di Dazzling_Lobster3656
23 commenti
We need fecking houses.
We do need immigrants, that’s true – but we need infrastructure and housing also so we should be encouraging people with those skills to come here – that would be a win-win as opposed to uncontrolled, unmanaged and unpoliced (in the sense of who is coming and why) immigration which is what we have now.
The system is broken and we must bow to whatever the EU decides on immigration ( Lisbon treaty 🙄 ). Unfortunately we don’t have the houses to accommodate unskilled workers and social welfare parasites. Legal reps and hotels are loving all the tax payer money in the pockets aswell. The door needs to be closed and a new system adopted and more deportations before we let more in. Otherwise we may end up as bad as France/England in a few short years
Which immigrants though?
Educated individuals from the critical skills list? Definitely.
Non-English speaking individuals with no in demand skills? Why do we need them?
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Immigrants, yes. Skilled, educated people that carry their weight and contribute. You get such people when you have an employment, business regulation, and taxation regime that allows them to thrive, and doesn’t tax them into the ground in order to maintain the other kind of immigrants. The net drain kind, that it’s unclear why they’re here.
The article text is actually a bit more lukewarm about immigration compared to the title.
>Adult countries make adult decisions about what is feasible, practicable and workable based on growth rates, construction capacity and the overall ability of the economy to deliver. Ireland is not opening the conversation, let alone making decisions. **Ultimately, the decision about how many people can immigrate each year should be driven by data, not by emotion.**
>Houses prices don’t affect us evenly. If you own a home, then you feel richer as prices rise. Rising prices have a positive effect on you. **If you don’t own a home, it has the opposite effect: your standard of living falls every time house prices rise because it takes more out of your income to pay for a roof over your head. This dynamic exacerbates the potential class divide.**
>All the while, the IDA is tasked with getting more and more investment into the country, demanding more and more skilled people, many of whom must be imported, who put yet more pressure on the system. Meanwhile younger Irish people leave.
>In contrast, in the 12 months to April 2024, 149,200 immigrants came into the country, outnumbering 69,900 who left. This marked [a 17-year high](https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-pme/populationandmigrationestimatesapril2024/keyfindings/) in immigration and the third successive year in which more than 100,000 immigrants entered the State. Of the people who came to the country, 30,000 (20 per cent) were returning Irish, 27,000 (18 per cent) were from the EU, 5,400 (4 per cent) were British and **58 per cent of all immigrants – 86,600 – came from the rest of the world. This final group is the only group over which the State has legal border control and this is where that adult conversation must begin.**
>**How many people is practical?** To put things into perspective, every 10,000 in net migration per annum roughly equates to increased demand for 4,000 dwellings (given their smaller average household size of 2.5 people). Using this logic, Ireland will need to build more than 36,000 new homes each year just to stand still – that’s more new homes than we are likely to build for everyone this year. This is a recipe for higher and higher houses prices and rents, angering more and more people.
>Without a serious data-based rather than emotional conversation, the social and political pot will continue to simmer.
What’s McWilliams point here? Nothing, as per usual.
‘We need immigrants. Immigrants put extra pressure on the system. We need a plan.’
What’s the plan David?
Is there anything to be said for more hotels on our historical O’Connell street. All praise the needle representing our growing heroin addict population who live on the street
Put them in cabins, build them in Longford, there’s nothing of use there. If I was fleeing a war I’d take a 12m² room with running water and a bed
Depends.
We have severe shortage of housing and services. People have to compete for resources. It is worse for individuals (including me) when there are more people to compete against.
If you are going to be net positive to economy and society, you are welcome.
If you are going to be net negative, stay where you are please.
Reunification should come before immigration
Why don’t they try get some diaspora back.
NL offers massive tax discounts to returning citizens for their first 3 years after returning.
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Ireland needs the *right sort* of immigrants, the ones that contribute to the economy. Which it already gets, by legal means. “Immigrants” in general are not a problem.
Yep we do, but they need to apply for the correct visas.
We need social housing for people on the waiting lists. If we actually solved these issues people wouldn’t be mad at immigrants.
Increasing immigration while there’s a shortage of services = people blaming immigrants for this instead of the government.
I can tell from the number of comments that this will be interesting 🙄
I always found David McWilliams to be a “in a perfect world” economist.
For instance, in a perfect world, it’s all highly skilled immigrants contributing large Paye payments and keeping the multinationals here by filling the skills shortages that the Irish populations can’t fill.
It’s all from an economic perspective never from a broader, more holistic view.
It needs a plan to house them, YES ! But it’s been 11 years of a severe housing crisis, and you have far too much faith in the Irish government!
I look forward to McWilliams’ next columns on the wetness of water and the blueness of the sky.
‘Ireland needs immigrants. But our economy can’t accommodate an infinite number’
– why is the title of the article different to the one on the thread? I agree with McWilliams. In any case, it’s a pity we, as a country, can’t seem have a calm sensible evidence-based discussion about it rather than people approaching it from both extremes, as is usually the case. It’s also a pity that a lot of people can’t seem to understand nuance and that immigration isn’t a binary issue. It’s too simple to reduce a complex topic like immigration to good vs bad. The numbers matter a lot. And the presence or, in our case absence, of any plan to accommodate huge numbers matters a lot.
Planned sustainable Immigration to fill important highly skilled gaps in the economy = great
Large Non-eu Immigration to fill lower skilled roles with salaries which likely require HAP and large government support for miniscule GDP gains and overheating the economy = not great
The debate around immigration is not nearly nuanced enough.
The country needs skilled workers, the work permit system works okay in this regard. What the country doesn’t need is an immigration free for all where tens if not hundreds of thousands of unskilled migrants are added into the market to compete for limited state resources with those from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
I am talking about the public health system, the public education system, housing, transport et cetera et cetera. To varying degrees they are finite resources, one hospital bed, one place in a waiting list, one accommodation space or 1 school placement cannot only ever be occupied by one person the same time.
For affluent people who have money, they can afford to go private. But by and large working class people have to compete.
And competition is not a great thing in this regard. It is just not in the public interest, no non-EU citizen who does not have a legal entitlement to be here should be granted a work permit unless there is a need for a particular skill that they have.
But the problem is authorities will not be focused, there will be a need for example a nurse or an architect and they will let in 10 people with no medical or architectural qualifications. When the lack of skills are brought up the solution offered will be to letting another 10 migrants!
And when you letting groups of people en masse, they are not going to integrate. They are going to stick with each other and form sort of balkenised communities within Irish cities or towns. As is very often the case many of the same social problems they left home to avoid rears its ugly head here.
It’s a pointless discussion.
It’s amazing how people in government have a really good idea and then execute it so poorly.
For example, the recent news about making apartments smaller etc etc. God could this have been conveyed any worse by the government. I worked a spell in Washington DC. On my own. My apartment near DuPont Circle was absolutely tiny. A bed, a small 2 person fold away couch beside it with the TV against the opposite wall. Which was about 4m away. I had a small closet and the kitchen at oke end. Opposite the kitchen I had a big window that overlooked the road. Then the bathroom was outside this room off a small “hall” I had just as I came on the door. I’ve never been in an apartment as small since. But guess what? It was beyond perfect for me.
I pretty much had the exact same situation in Stockholm Sweden but with a slightly smaller kitchen.
Again. Perfect for what I needed. Young adults need to get the hell out of their parents house and start living their lives. Tiny apartments, as long as they are used for what they are intended for, are absolutely brilliant. No doubt we’ll fuck it up and charge half a million for them or build them in Newbridge or Cavan or something dumb like that.
As for immigrants. If you want a country to grow it needs immigration. However, our immigration policy in Ireland seems to be “fuck over the legit applications with delays etc and give it free and easy to the people who have torn up their passports on the plane here. (Ask any Aussie, yank or kiwi who married an Irish person).
We just need people who have a fucking plan and understand that it’s not just “idea and execution”. It’s “idea, step 1, step 2, step 3 and step 4” and you have to know all the steps at the very beginning. Which isn’t that hard really when you have contingencies
Makes me proud that people want to move to this little island. Immigrants have gumption.