Opinion

Newton Emerson: Unlike Britain, immigration is a non-issue in Northern Ireland

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

Immigration rules will change immediately in the event of a no deal Brexit
Immigration rules will change immediately in the event of a no deal Brexit Immigration rules will change immediately in the event of a no deal Brexit

Immigration has so far been a non-issue in Northern Ireland’s Brexit debate.

Last week, 20 business organisations issued a joint appeal to the prime minister warning the economy here will suffer without a flexible immigration policy.

They fear manufacturing and food processing firms will have to relocate to the Republic, the hospitality industry will be unable to recruit enough staff and the proposed £50,000 minimum salary for medium and high-skilled immigrants to the UK is at least £20,000 too high for Northern Ireland’s circumstances.

Yet the public remains unmoved. The Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey has found people are largely ambivalent about recent immigration trends - we did not care much about their occurrence, so would presumably not care much if they stopped.

The Brexit vote in England is often criticised as a xenophobic backlash but we have little appreciation in Northern Ireland of the pressures people in England, native and immigrant, have experienced. No provision was planned for the new arrivals - government projections were a gross underestimate. Officialdom had to wait for the 2011 census to measure the population increase, by which point it was too late. Schools, hospitals and housing in already-crowded parts of the country became grotesquely overloaded, creating inevitable resentment.

None of this has happened here. Only one person in 1,000 in Northern Ireland is a migrant worker, compared to 4.5 in 1,000 across England.

Since large-scale immigration from Eastern Europe began 15 years ago, Northern Ireland’s migrant worker population has held stable at around 32,000 people, two-thirds of them concentrated around Dungannon and Craigavon, where they perform jobs local people no longer want to do and live in town centres where local people no longer want to live, propping up lucrative little buy-to-let empires. There is no statistical evidence they have lowered wages or raised rents - and little false perception of this either, despite attempts in certain quarters to stir the pot.

Of the 175,000 immigrants to enter Northern Ireland since 2001, just 2,000 have ever received social housing. Our schools have surplus places due to duplication in the education system, which by luck remains particularly true in areas of migrant employment. Most of the new arrivals are in their 20s, so their main impact on healthcare has been on maternity services - around 10 per cent of births in Northern Ireland are to non-native mothers, rising to nearly double that in Craigavon. But childbirth cannot be put on a waiting list so the NHS has just had to get on with it - meaning the phenomenon, while noticeable, has never become a grievance.

In short, migrant workers have slotted into a neat gap where the rest of us can happily ignore them.

The British government has pledged that none of the 3.5 million EU citizens already in the UK will lose any residency rights due to Brexit. However, the turnover of migrant workers in Northern Ireland is so high that most of our immigrant population would be gone within two years without replenishment.

Would that be greeted with a shrug of the shoulders? We might notice the economic cost: a 2016 Stormont research paper found migrant workers contribute a net £1.2 billion and sustain 8,000 mainly better-paid jobs beyond their own number - equivalent to two Bombardiers.

But even that feels like it should only be part of the loss. The same paper said immigration “enriches our society through cultural diversity.”

That is a bit overblown when almost all our migrant workers are from other European Christian countries. Still, their arrival has been such a historically unprecedented and previously unthinkable event it is oddly pathetic it could come and go amid general indifference. Should something more than cheap chicken not have been made of it?

Missing from this debate are the voices of migrants themselves. What has their experience been and how much have they valued it? Has it been life-changing, a chance for a new life or just a youthful adventure of bad jobs and terrible housing? Did they want to contribute and would the rest of us let them?

Many of us are aware - certainly if you are from Portadown - of migrant workers who have gone on to professional employment, started their own businesses or returned to education. Eastern Europeans in Britain sometimes speak of a ‘British dream’. Has there ever been a Northern Ireland dream, laughable though that question might now sound?

It seems a shame, almost a disgrace, that we have never cared to ask.

newton@irishnews.com