Economy

Staying away: Why was immigration falling during pre-Covid boom?

CSO data points to fall-off in inward migration during jobs boom

It’s hard to know how the coronavirus crisis will affect migration patterns going forward. Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA Wire

Sat Aug 22 2020 - 01:55

One of the head-scratchers posed by this week's population numbers was the fall-off in net inward migration. The figures, published by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) on Thursday, show immigrants, those coming in to the State from abroad, fell by 3.6 per cent to 85,400 in the year to April; while emigrants, those leaving, rose by nearly 3 per cent to 56,500.

These combined flows resulted in net inward migration of 28,900, a reduction of 4,800 or 14.2 per cent on the previous year.

In the context of a booming economy and a buoyant labour market, which pertained up until the arrival of Covid-19, one might have expected a further pick-up in inward migration. Brexit had also been adding to the inward flow in recent years.

KBC bank economist Austin Hughes said the trend was difficult to explain. Ger Brady of employers' group Ibec, however, blamed capacity issues.

READ MORE

“Before Covid-19 we had been seeing a flattening of inward migration for a number of years,” Brady said. “This is mostly reflective of an economy which had been running close to capacity and had significant quality-of-life challenges in areas such as housing, transport and childcare. These challenges will still exist in the post-Covid world,” he added.

It’s hard to know how the coronavirus crisis will affect these patterns going forward. “There is an interesting natural experiment underway in the jobs market where travel restrictions reduce migration as a two-way safety valve,” Hughes noted.

“It will be interesting to see if the ‘push’ factor of weaker level of activity here or ‘pull’ factor of less generous entitlements elsewhere dominate. At the margin, less inward migration should limit pressure on accommodation, giving a little more scope to deal with what the overall pace of population growth suggests will remain a significant problem,” he added.

We await the results with interest.

LATEST STORIES