European Union in Action
And while the country mulls over whether voting No to Lisbon was such a great idea after all, the big news this week was the report by the ESRI, which confirmed what everyone with half an ounce of sense has known for a while – Ireland’s boom has bust and we’re in a recession.
Finally, long-time Jeremiahs like David McWilliams and the posters at bust-watching site The Property Pin have been vindicated. Property prices are tanking (moving the prospect of home ownership back into the achievable goal category), ghost estates litter the rain-soaked countryside and the hundreds of thousands of Eastern European immigrants who flocked here in the heydays of the boom are returning home to fuel the boom in their own countries.
One of the many planks that the No to Lisbon campaign was built from was a largely unspoken resentment of immigrants and how they “stole our jobs” and “undercut our wages”. Thanks to the EU, the cant went, we were favouring foreigners over our own.
As this article in the Wall Street Journal points out just how much ill-informed xenophobic bullshit this is:
Eastern European immigrants helped fill shortages for skilled labor and prop up house prices. The hourly wages of Eastern European immigrants are 45% less than their Irish counterparts with similar education and experience, according to the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin.
“I couldn’t afford to be in business without them,” says Irish restaurateur Vincent Mullen, a lanky 39-year-old who is about to open a new cafe. A third of his staff will be from the newer EU members. Without them, he says, he’d “have to pay huge wages for inexperienced domestic staff.”
Rather than making us poorer, EU facilitated immigration has made us richer over the last decade. Britain, Ireland and Sweden – ironically some of the more Eurosceptic countries in the Union – have benefited from the vast supplies of cheap labour from the east, while Germany and France, who talk the talk of European integration, have steadfastly refused to walk the walk and have instead put visa restrictions on immigrants from the east.
And now – thanks to the same combination of cheap airtravel*, EU regulations and our old friend, the Invisible Hand of the Market – those immigrants are going home to fuel the booms in their own countries, just as the bust hits here. And it seems that quite a few of our own suddenly unemployed builders and tradesmen will be going with them:
In a bid to help unemployed construction workers, Ireland’s employment agency recently held a job fair where officials from Eastern Europe and elsewhere touted job opportunities in their countries. “It’s the reverse of what we’ve been doing for the last 10 years,” says Kevin Quinn, the department’s international employment manager. “We’ve been going to [Eastern Europe] looking for construction workers, and now they’re short of workers at a time when we seem to have a surplus.”
The irony, of course, is that many of those self-same builders, who may soon be working on building sites in Krakow and Warsaw, are likely to have been foremost in the anti-EU hysteria that led to the No vote two weeks ago.
Allowing people the freedom to move between states in Europe to better themselves and make everyone more prosperous is the spirit of the Treaty of Rome and the EU in action. This is the kind of thing the government and the Yes campaign need to point out and remind people if there is a do-over of the Lisbon Referendum.
And since hypocrisy is so corrosive to idealism, it’d be worth reminding our friends in France and Germany that too before they lecture us on how to be good Europeans.
*: The importance of cheap airtravel can’t be overstated. Allowing people to move and go where they want enriches the people themselves, the country they go to and (through remittances), the country they’ve come from.
Free movement also reduces social tensions in the long term. If poor people can move to a rich country to work, they don’t stagnate in ghettos in their own country. Equally, when, as has happened in Ireland, the boom busts – freedom of movement is vital to allow those immigrants to move onto the next boom town, and again, prevent ghettoisation and xenophobia growing among the resentful and suddenly not so prosperous natives.
That’s something worth remembering next time you see eco-warriors protesting about new runways and the airline industry.
