Ireland talks about immigration constantly.
We talk about housing and asylum centres, labour shortages and refugees, hotels and borders, compassion and capacity. We argue about numbers, although often without agreeing what the numbers mean. Increasingly, we argue about the people doing the arguing.
The vocabulary is familiar.
Pro-immigration or anti-immigration. Welcoming or hostile. Progressive or reactionary. Enlightened or racist.
These categories are useful if the purpose is to decide which side somebody is on. They are less useful if the purpose is to understand immigration.
Perhaps we need some different words.
Not because different words will give us the answer. They won’t. But they may allow us to see parts of the question that our existing vocabulary obscures.
Let’s begin with a proposition.
Immigration has a price. No immigration has a price. Every point between them has a price. A functioning democracy should be able to discuss which price it wants to pay.
There Is No Free Position
The case made for immigration is familiar. It can expand the workforce, bring skills, replenish an ageing population, create businesses and increase the tax base. It can also bring new ideas, cultures and connections to the wider world.
The case made against high levels of immigration is familiar too: pressure on housing and public services, fiscal costs where employment is low, difficulties of integration, rapid demographic change and concern about cultural continuity.
Different forms of immigration also produce different effects. A surgeon recruited by a hospital, an international student, an EU worker, an asylum seeker and an elderly dependent relative are all immigrants in one sense, but they are not economically or socially interchangeable.
Some of these effects can be measured. Some are contested. Some cannot easily be measured at all.
That isn’t our concern here.
Whatever weight we assign them, they belong on the ledger.
And restricting immigration has a ledger too.
Japan makes this unusually visible. Faced with an ageing and declining population, it has historically been much more reluctant than many Western countries to use large-scale immigration as the solution. It has consequently been prepared to accept costs associated with that choice.
Canada made a different bargain.
Neither escaped paying.
They bought different things.
There is no free position.
Cultural Density
I spent most of my adult life in Canada.
For many years I ran a software company in Toronto whose employees came from all over the world. At one point there were more than fifty nationalities represented in the company.
It felt easy.
Returning to Ireland after more than forty years away, I have sometimes wondered why the same degree of diversity feels different here.
Perhaps part of the answer lies in something I will call cultural density.
I don’t mean cultural richness. Toronto is one of the most culturally rich cities imaginable.
By cultural density, I mean something closer to the amount of inherited knowledge, memory, behaviour, convention and identity embedded in belonging to a particular society.
Toronto has a culture, certainly, but becoming a Torontonian is remarkably easy. You can arrive from Karachi, Kraków or Cork and, surprisingly quickly, become someone from Toronto. The identity has considerable room in it.
Ireland feels different.
Japan feels very different.
Japan is extraordinarily culturally dense. Language, etiquette, ritual, history, food, aesthetics, social obligations and expectations about behaviour are woven tightly through everyday life. To become resident in Japan and to become culturally Japanese are quite different propositions.
Ireland is nowhere near Japan on that spectrum. But neither is it Toronto.
Irish culture contains an enormous amount of accumulated information: history, humour, music, sport, language, family, county, landscape, ways of speaking and ways of not quite saying what we mean. Much of it is barely visible until you have been away from it.
This suggests another proposition:
The price of immigration partly depends on the cultural density of the receiving society.
Cultural density isn’t something the Central Statistics Office can measure. It isn’t an objective property waiting to be discovered.
It is a lens.
But through that lens, something normally described simply as fear of immigration may occasionally look different.
It may partly be a fear of losing cultural density.
If Culture Has Value
That fear deserves examination rather than immediate approval or condemnation.
If the accumulated cultural signals that make Ireland recognisably Ireland gradually become less widely understood, less frequently practised and less successfully transmitted, has something of value been lost?
Surely the answer must at least be: possibly.
We already behave as though Irish culture has value. We spend money preserving the Irish language. We protect archaeological sites and Georgian buildings. We support traditional music, literature, the arts and the GAA. We worry about the survival of the Gaeltacht. We preserve landscapes partly because they have acquired cultural meaning.
So another pair of propositions follows:
If culture has value, cultural continuity must have some value. If cultural continuity has no value, what exactly are we integrating people into?
The important word is some.
Cultural continuity is not infinitely valuable. It does not automatically outweigh economic prosperity, humanitarian obligations, individual freedom, demographic necessity or the benefits of an open society.
It simply belongs on the ledger.
And cultural continuity cannot mean preventing cultural change.
Ireland itself demonstrates why.
The Country I Left No Longer Exists
The Ireland I returned to after more than forty years was profoundly different from the Ireland I had left.
The authority of the Catholic Church had collapsed. Women’s lives had changed. Attitudes toward marriage, sexuality and family had changed. Ireland had become prosperous and deeply European. Education, television, cheap travel, the internet and American culture had transformed everyday life.
Much of that transformation had little or nothing to do with immigration.
Ireland changed itself.
And yet I returned to Ireland.
Not to some entirely different society occupying the same island. Something had persisted through all that extraordinary change.
Which suggests another distinction:
Cultural continuity is not the absence of change. It is the persistence of recognisable belonging through change.
Cultures that cannot change are museum exhibits.
Living cultures change constantly. The interesting question is whether something recognisably shared continues through that change.
And at this point we encounter perhaps the most difficult part of the immigration conversation.
Race.
Are We Talking About Culture or Race?
When somebody expresses concern about cultural change caused by immigration, the accusation of racism can arrive remarkably quickly.
Sometimes it is entirely justified.
Racists exist. Racial hostility exists. People can use the language of culture as a socially acceptable substitute for beliefs that are fundamentally about ethnicity or ancestry.
But that cannot be the end of the inquiry.
Before deciding what moral category an argument belongs in, perhaps we should ask a much simpler question:
Are we talking about culture or race?
They are not the same thing.
Ancestry is inherited. Culture is transmitted.
Culture can be learned. It can be entered. It can be rejected. It can be borrowed from other cultures and altered. People can participate in several cultures simultaneously. They can transmit a culture to children whose ancestry is quite different from that of the people who created it.
Ancestry doesn’t work like that.
This gives us a useful distinction.
The fact that racists can appropriate the language of cultural continuity does not make cultural continuity a racist concept. Equally, calling something cultural does not make it immune from racism. The distinction lies partly in what is being protected: a culture that others can enter, or an ancestry they cannot.
Or more simply:
A culture can be entered. An ancestry cannot.
Ireland doesn’t have to look very far to understand this.
Ask whether a Black person can be Irish and the question is almost comical. Phil Lynott has practically been canonised.
A Black child raised in Galway, speaking with a Galway accent, does not need to explain his Galway credentials to me. The moment he speaks, an enormous amount of cultural information becomes apparent. Place, upbringing, shared references and belonging can overwhelm visible difference remarkably quickly.
Conversely, somebody can possess generations of Irish ancestry while knowing almost nothing about Ireland.
If our definition of cultural continuity cannot accommodate the Black Galwegian because of his ancestry, then perhaps culture isn’t really what we are trying to preserve.
But the reverse matters too.
If someone worries about the loss of Irish cultural practices, shared memory or ways of life, it does not follow that their real concern must secretly be the racial composition of Ireland.
Sometimes culture and race are deliberately confused.
Sometimes they are accidentally confused.
Sometimes the person making the argument may not have worked out which one they mean.
That seems a good reason to ask the question before reaching for the label.
Immigration Is Not Integration
There is another distinction our existing vocabulary tends to blur.
Immigration describes movement across a border.
Integration describes what happens afterwards.
They are not the same thing.
And this leads to perhaps the most uncomfortable proposition in this essay:
Immigration without integration is, eventually, just population transfer.
By integration I do not mean assimilation.
Integration does not require somebody arriving in Ireland to stop being Polish, Nigerian, Indian, Ukrainian or anything else. Nor should Ireland remain culturally untouched by the people who arrive here.
I remember something similar from London.
There are distinctly Black South London accents that are simultaneously completely Black British and unmistakably London. Nobody imported those accents intact from somewhere else. Nor are they simply older white London accents spoken by Black people.
Something new emerged.
London affected the newcomers. The newcomers affected London. And what emerged became part of London.
Perhaps successful integration looks something like this:
You came here. We affected you. You affected us. Something recognisably shared emerged.
That is cultural continuity without cultural stasis.
London changed.
London remained London.
What If People Don’t Want to Integrate?
This objection inevitably appears.
And sometimes it will be true.
Some immigrants will have little interest in integrating into the surrounding society. Others will integrate enthusiastically. Many will do something in between without thinking very much about it.
But the word they does an extraordinary amount of work in the sentence they don’t want to integrate. It converts millions of individuals with different backgrounds, motivations and circumstances into a single intentional actor.
A more useful question is what makes integration more or less likely.
The willingness of the newcomer surely matters.
So does the behaviour of the receiving society.
But numbers may matter too. So may speed and geographic concentration.
Someone arriving in an Irish town where almost nobody shares their language or background will encounter Irish society constantly—at work, at school, in shops, through neighbours and friendships.
Someone arriving into a large, established community from their country of origin may be able to construct a successful life while interacting much less with the surrounding culture.
Nobody has necessarily done anything wrong.
The social architecture is simply different.
This suggests another term: integration capacity.
Countries clearly have physical capacity constraints. Houses, classrooms, hospital beds and infrastructure are finite.
Perhaps societies also have some finite capacity to turn immigration into integration.
Again, this is not a number we can calculate. It is another lens through which to examine what is happening.
And integration necessarily involves reciprocal obligations.
A society cannot integrate people who refuse to join it. People cannot integrate into a society that refuses to let them join. Nobody can integrate into a society that is afraid to say what joining it means.
That last problem may be particularly relevant to Ireland.
Being welcoming is not the same thing as integrating people.
Welcoming says: you may come in.
Integration eventually has to answer the much harder question:
What are we joining together?
Different Words
None of this tells us how many immigrants Ireland should accept. It doesn’t tell us whether current immigration is too high or too low, or whether Japan has chosen more wisely than Canada.
That is deliberate.
We have simply tried some different words: price, cultural density, cultural continuity, integration capacity, recognisable belonging.
They are constructions too. Another interface placed between us and something considerably more complicated.
They are foma.
Perhaps slightly more agentic foma.
Their usefulness lies only in what they allow us to see.
The old vocabulary asks whether we are pro-immigration or anti-immigration, welcoming or hostile, enlightened or racist.
Perhaps those categories arrive too early.
There is no free position.
Immigration has a price. No immigration has a price. Every point between them has a price. A functioning democracy should be able to discuss which price it wants to pay.
And it needs a language in which it can do so without first deciding what kind of person is allowed to speak.