In a country struggling to cope with a growing population, it seems reasonable to limit the number of migrants allowed in. I’m all in favour of this with just one proviso: those who want to see it happen should volunteer to do all the crap jobs.
There’s a thing we don’t like to say but know to be true: the Micks and the Maureens don’t want to do hard labour anymore. For generations we occupied the lower levels of the American and British economies, digging canals and tunnels, cleaning toilets, serving food, carrying hods, emptying bed pans. We had enough of it to last us several centuries.
We forget how recently we were the crap-job migrants. A study of people leaving Cork in 1990, for example, found that “The vast majority of Cork emigrants are not climbing social ladders abroad. Indeed many are simply climbing ladders because the construction industry alone accounts for almost 30 per cent of male emigrants from Cork.” A similar proportion of female emigrants were working in low-paid service employment in retail and hospitality. Fewer than one in 10, on the other hand, were in high-status jobs.
Many Irish-born people (especially women and early school leavers) still work in low paid employment. But taken as a whole, there’s been a staggering transformation. Well over half the Irish population (56 per cent) has a third-level qualification. For those aged between 25 and 34 this rises to two-thirds. And we don’t go to college to learn how to make up hotel beds or deliver pizzas.
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We’ve become a white-collar nation. We’ve put the “pro” into proletariat. Occupations defined as “professionals”, “associate professionals” or “managers” account for approximately 1.2 million people at work in Ireland. That’s an astonishing 45 per cent of the total workforce. Conversely, just 260,700 of us work in what are known politely as “elementary occupations” (crap jobs, in other words) – a mere 10 per cent of the workforce.
And good for us. I’ve done my time as a contract cleaner and I’ve sweated in the opinion mines. You can tell which job I prefer. Skilled manual work may of course be both very rewarding and very well rewarded and it’s certainly arguable that we’ve gone too far in equating a good career with a university education. But that bottom 10 per cent of jobs are neither fulfilling nor well paid – and the great majority of Irish-born people neither want nor need to do them.
This is where migration comes in. Nearly 10 per cent of our workforce is made up of people who are citizens of other countries – close to a quarter of a million workers. (This does not include migrants who have been here long enough to acquire Irish citizenship.) It’s not, for sure, that all or even most migrants are in crap jobs. Four in every 10 doctors working in our health service qualified abroad. A quarter of our nurses and midwives are from other countries – an extraordinary 15 per cent from India alone. And the IT sector is also very heavily dependent on migrants: non-Irish citizens account for almost two-fifths of those employed in information and communications technology.
But no one half-sane (admittedly not a qualification that applies to most of the Ireland is Full mob) would suggest that we should stop our hospitals hiring doctors and nurses from abroad and prevent Microsoft or Google from importing the IT specialists they need. So if we were going to seriously limit migration, the people we’d be keeping out are the ones who take up those “elementary occupations”.
Anyone with eyes and ears can see that much of the unskilled or semi-skilled work in Ireland is being done by migrants. And figures bear this out. For example, last year, of the jobs held by people who had arrived here as refugees from Ukraine, a third were in hospitality (pubs, hotels, restaurants); 16 per cent were in wholesale and retail and 12 per cent in manufacturing. Overall, nearly three-quarters of the Ukrainians were in unskilled or semi-skilled jobs.
These jobs are relatively poorly paid. If you work in IT in Ireland, you earn on average €42.10 an hour. If you work in the accommodation and food sector, you’re paid much less than half that: an average of €16.20 an hour. It’s not hard to guess which kind of job well established Irish-born people would prefer, and which will be left over for those who are scrambling to get a foothold in Irish society.
Like every other capitalist economy, ours exploits the labour of those who are least secure and who have least power. We get them to do our dirty work for us. The fewer rights migrants have, the easier they are to exploit. And we live in economies that have an insatiable appetite for exploitable workers.
This is why, after Brexit, migration into the UK didn’t drop – it actually rose sharply. That whole escapade was driven largely by the promise that “taking back control” would mean that inward migration would be greatly reduced. Instead, Brexit has merely replaced migrants from the EU with larger numbers of cheaper workers from outside the EU. Who could have guessed that English nationalists don’t want to work as fruit pickers?
If we were serious about stopping people coming here to work in low-paid jobs, we would have to be willing to do three things. One would be to greatly increase the number of Irish early school leavers – not, I think, a social policy any party is going to advocate. The second would be to abolish crap jobs by hugely improving wages and conditions for those at the bottom – and consequently paying much higher prices for the services they provide. And the third would be to conscript all Conor McGregor’s “Ireland for the Irish” fans into a standing army of toilet cleaners, social care workers, fruit and vegetable pickers, Deliveroo couriers, security guards, chambermaids, meat factory butchers and kitchen porters. Instead of flipping Vs at dark-skinned people, they could flip burgers for Ireland.
