Saudi Arabia to expel up to 2 million workers

coolbeans wrote: »

Not really sure how our immigration policies deepened the crisis. It was excessive lending by the banks coupled with irresponsible borrowing by a huge minority of Irish people that led to that..

And a great deal of that excessive borrowing was to build second homes as resale investments. Second homes that were often partially built by migrant labour, often to be lived in by more newly arrived migrant tenants attracted to the country with the promise of jobs building more new homes, while the landlord waited for the property to rise to a ridiculously profitable re sale value. A great deal of these migrants are now gone, forming part of the reason for the ghost estates and the high home vacancy rate, which leads to these investors being stuck with a house that has nobody in it paying rent and that they can't quickly sell for a price that will cover their original mortgage. None of this would have happened to such a serious extent if we had undertaken some sort of quota/ renewable permit scheme like most of the rest of the EU, simply because the yearly increasing demand for rented accommodation would not have been as high, and few people are willing to take out a bank loan and have a house sit there completely empty for 10 years waiting for the bubble to peak, are they? A vicious circle that was the type of get rich quick scheme the government is meant to avoid promoting. Developments started in, roughly, the period from early 2008, were built on the incorrect assumption that this constant inward flow would not stop any time soon, rather than having a system where we knew that x number of migrants were to be allowed in in 2008 and building a suitable, rather than short sightedly excessive, amount of housing for them. The crisis of Ghost Estates and high vacancy would have happened regardless, but certainly not to the same extent.

Of course, people would rather blame the "bastard bankers" for feeding them scandalous loans like an alcoholic blaming the pub for serving him enough drink to ruin his life, and the government for letting the migrants in, rather than blame the biggest player in it all, themselves and the getting one up on the Jones new car yearly Bulgarian holiday home lifestyle.