Immigration and Ireland - MEGATHREAD *Mod Note Added 02/09/25*

I don't think we should send people back to a country that is under 24/7 bombardment. But I think there should be a First Safe country principle. I believe that principle should be enshrined in an amendment to the Refugee Convention. The Convention is woefully out of date, and the UN tends to interpret it as putting maximum obligations on the West, and none on the Global South or China.

Absolutely agree that people shouldn’t be sent back to areas of bombardment but I think there needs to be some reflection on taking in more Ukrainian refugees when hotels with attractive return on investment are being built in western Ukraine and tourism is being promoted in the area.

Why should Ireland exacerbate its existing accommodation crisis by continuing to welcome everyone getting off a plane, ferry, arrive over the border claiming they are fleeing from their lives when tourists are being encouraged to visit the country they are fleeing from or indeed where many of the existing refugees are regularly returning to the country for medical/dental treatment and visiting family.

There needs to be an open discussion on this without the heretofore labelling of people calling for it as far right, racists, bigots, whatever your having yourself. I mean even the great Harris is calling for it at this point

See i don't buy the idea it's just to do with colonialism. We just have to look at Sweden to see that a country not having a colonial past does not mean all immigration will be good.

Let's also remember England has Rapid Demographic change that would make us Blush. Something like 50% of all recent births in England are Non White British/Irish. Just have a look at the cities such as London having a person to become a Politician in Bangladesh.

Most of these migrants simply have loyalties to other regions. Realistically it would require going back to a pre internet/mass travel age for any integration to actually take place ala Brazil. This is how us Irish went from our lowly social status in the Anglosphere - Once we went were never able to bring our entire Towns and Villages with us.

Simply put we at minimum need to tighten for dependents at a minimum to stop Chain Migration.

Many of our non EU work permits go to Indians. In India, dual citizenship is not allowed. About 48% of Indian-born people in the US have US citizenship, which in many cases are people who originally had Indian citizenship.

Around 670,000 Indians gave up Indian citizenship globally in 2015-19.

The Indian government has introduced a special scheme allowing ex citizens to retain certain rights that citizens have in India.

Pakistan on the other hand allows dual citizenship.

The UK has had most difficulty integrating young Pakistanis, who are more likely (social media etc) to have been radicalised than the first generation who tended to be more secular. The founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was the leader of the Muslim League, but is seen as more a secularist who identified as a Muslim.

Joe Biden was one of the first Centre Left western leaders to criticise restrictive immigration policies in India. The Modi government passed a law recently which restricted Muslim immigration. It seems that multiculturalism is something only the West is supposed to do, not the Global South. Is there a double-standard? I think there is.

India passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 (CAA) which grants a fast-track route to Indian citizenship for non-Muslim refugees from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan (Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, Christians) who entered India before 31 Dec 2014.

Japan has a de facto zero immigration policy. China is considering attracting migrants, but this is encountering backlash from nationalists who accuse the government of "repeating the West's mistakes". Newspaper report on this here.

Are you saying that we can't see limits on how many UKR people come here under BOTP?

FR is way bigger than us, but has received 55k UKR adults.

Austria, which is much closer to UKR, has received 87,400.

Relative to our population, we have received a lot.

Is it a demand-led scheme? By that I mean, can anybody tell the UKR people where to go? Or do the UKR people simply choose themselves.

If the UKR people can choose their destination, then I suggest we make ourselves much less attractive.

Harris Is really pulling a Leo on this immigration turnaround, he's getting out slightly earlier than the rest.

Hes obviously not as simple as his name suggests.

A factor here is that Ireland is a neutral country and not a member of NATO. There may have been an element of Ireland taking in more Ukrainian refugees than many countries as a way of helping Ukraine's war effort, but without the arms or military funding.

To give a couple of examples, both Denmark and Finland spend €6bn a year on their military - compared to Ireland's €1.5bn.

I thought we don't control the number of UKR people that come here?

10% of the population of Kerry now Ukrainians, 11.5% Leitrim.

Maybe one of the army of journalists outraged over the bike shed could enquire what genius in government insisted on giving full dole to them a few years ago.

I don't see Ukrainians as fake asylum seekers unlike many coming from safe countries.

But I'm annoyed with France for not taking more. France and the UK, per capita, have taken a tiny fraction of the numbers we have taken . France around 100,000, UK better but around 300,000.

I agree that paying the full €220 welfare rate for 2 years was excessive. But in this case people were fleeing destroyed cities like Mariupol, which used to have 500,000 people living in it. That would be a mix of different classes, which helps explain why some have expensive cars, not because they are milking the system as some on social media suggest.

The vast majority of Ukrainians in Ireland are from the groups allowed to leave, namely women, children (though some have reached adulthood during the war) and elderly.

If the whole of Ukraine ends up under occupation, millions more will head west. So we should continue supporting Ukraine as a state. Because in future, an EU country might be in Ukraines position and if that happens, they will be asking for this kind of help.

Here is CSO data on arrivals from UKR:

No they aren't fake AS but not all of them that came here would be from were the fighting is happening.

Ukraine is about the size of France and Germany combined and many have left the parts of the country where there are no Russian soldiers or bombs being dropped and come to countries like Ireland as refugees.

Do we call them refugees or is there another term we can use to describe them?

As long as they're integrating well is this a problem? Who knows Volodymyr Shevchenko could be captaining Kerry to an All-Ireland in 15 years…