Across Ireland, north and south, immigration has become one of the defining political issues of recent years. From the racist violence witnessed in Belfast to protests outside accommodation centres and anti-immigration demonstrations across the country, a familiar political argument is repeatedly advanced. Migrants are blamed for housing shortages, overstretched public services, labour market pressures and declining living standards.
The proposed solution is straightforward: drastically reduce immigration and remove large numbers of migrants from the country.
Rather than dismissing this argument out of hand, it is worth taking it seriously. Let us assume, for a moment, that they get exactly what they want. Imagine that tomorrow a government comes to power committed to implementing this programme. Large-scale deportations begin and immigration is sharply restricted. ‘Irish jobs for Irish workers’ becomes official policy.
So what happens next?
The first thing to understand is that such a programme would not be a simple administrative exercise. Removing hundreds of thousands of people from the country would require immigration raids, detention facilities, deportation procedures, expanded enforcement powers, and a vast state bureaucracy to carry it out. Families would be separated. Communities would be disrupted. People who have lived and worked in Ireland for years would suddenly find themselves targeted by the state. One only needs to look across the Atlantic to see this playing out in real time.
Leaving that barbarity and the human suffering it would cause aside for a moment, let us focus solely on the economic consequences, which would be immediate. Across Ireland, north and south, migrant labour has become deeply embedded in the functioning of the economy. Healthcare, hospitality, transport, logistics, food production, agriculture, manufacturing and construction all rely heavily on workers who were born elsewhere.
In the South, non-Irish nationals accounted for 27.5 per cent of employees in 2024. Between 2019 and 2024, the number of employees increased by 355,332, with non-Irish nationals contributing 61.4 per cent of that growth.¹ The North faces many of the same realities. One major study found that 78 per cent of employers reported migrant workers helped maintain an adequate supply of labour, particularly in healthcare, agri-food, food processing and hospitality.²
Healthcare provides perhaps the clearest example. More than half of practising nurses in the Republic of Ireland received their initial nursing qualification outside the state, while 43 per cent of doctors obtained their first medical qualification outside Ireland.³ In 2024, almost four out of every five newly registered nurses and midwives were educated outside Ireland.⁴ Similar trends can be seen across the NHS in the North.⁵
These workers are not a small addition to the health service. They are a central part of it. Parents waiting for CAMHS appointments, families seeking disability support, elderly people relying on home-care services and patients awaiting treatment are already dealing with systems under severe strain. Removing large numbers of migrant healthcare workers would not ease those pressures. It would deepen them.
Many of the people blamed for overstretched services are among those helping to provide them. The same pattern exists throughout the wider economy. Hotels would struggle to recruit staff. Construction projects would slow. Food producers would face labour shortages. Transport and logistics networks would come under increasing pressure. Services would contract despite continued demand.
And the consequences would extend beyond the labour market. Migrants are not simply workers. They are also taxpayers, consumers, tenants, homeowners, parents and business owners. In the South alone, non-Irish nationals account for roughly a quarter of total earnings.⁶ This translates into billions of euro in income tax, USC and PRSI contributions that help fund schools, hospitals, roads, public transport and public infrastructure.
The argument being peddled by the anti-migrant right is that removing hundreds of thousands of people would reduce demand on public services, ease pressure on the housing market and create opportunities for ‘Irish jobs for Irish workers’. In essence, it claims to offer a solution to many of the crises people currently face.
So let us examine the actual consequences. Yes, such a policy may reduce demand for housing and public services. But it would also reduce the workforce, the tax base and the productive capacity that sustains those services in the first place. The result would not be a stable new equilibrium. It would be a downward spiral.
Fewer workers would mean lower economic output. Lower output would mean lower tax revenues. Lower revenues would place further pressure on already stretched public services. Labour shortages would deepen, investment would slow and economic disruption would intensify. Each problem would reinforce the next.
Ireland does not need to speculate about the effects of large-scale population loss. We have experienced them before. Following the financial crash, emigration surged. Between 2010 and 2014 there were almost 110,000 more departures from Ireland than arrivals.⁷ Communities lost workers, businesses lost customers and public services lost staff. The consequences were felt for years and many are still visible today.
This raises an obvious question. If removing large numbers of working-age people from an economy is the solution to social and economic problems, why are so many of Ireland’s current difficulties connected to the last period when large numbers left?
The reality is that sooner or later any government implementing a programme of mass deportation would confront a choice. It could continue down the path of worsening labour shortages, declining public services and economic deterioration. Or it could begin reopening migration channels in an attempt to stabilise the situation.
In other words, it would find itself back where it started: dependent on migrant labour to fill essential gaps in the workforce, only after inflicting enormous damage on the economy in the process. The contradiction is obvious.
The policy would begin by removing workers and end by searching for workers. The promised solution would quickly recreate the very conditions that led employers and public services to recruit internationally in the first place. The problem is not simply that this programme is cruel. The problem is that it does not work.
This points towards a deeper issue that rarely receives the same attention. Ireland recruits nurses from abroad while many Irish-trained nurses leave for Australia, Britain and Canada. It recruits workers internationally while thousands of Irish citizens continue to emigrate every year. Between April 2024 and April 2025, approximately 35,000 Irish citizens emigrated.⁸ The same economy imports labour and exports labour.
Many migrants come to Ireland for the same reasons Irish people have emigrated for generations: to find work, build a future and support their families. Others arrive from countries affected by war, instability, environmental crisis and historical colonial underdevelopment. Whatever the reasons people arrive in Ireland, they did not create the housing crisis, healthcare crisis or cost-of-living crisis. They arrived in a society where those problems already existed.
A country that spends enormous resources training nurses, doctors, tradespeople and graduates should be asking not why we have so many immigrants, but why we have so many emigrants.
Why is housing unaffordable? Why are public services under such pressure? Why do employers struggle to recruit while so many young people still see emigration as their best option? These questions rarely feature in anti-immigration politics because they point beyond migration itself.
The causes of Ireland’s problems are not difficult to identify. Decades of failed housing policy, underinvestment in public services, poor workforce planning, rising living costs and an economic model geared towards profitability and attracting capital rather than meeting social need have all played a role. Migration did not create these failures. In many cases, migrant workers helped prevent them from becoming even worse.
None of this means migration policy is beyond discussion. Every society must make decisions about housing, infrastructure, healthcare, education and labour needs. Public safety matters too, and those who commit crimes should face the full force of the law regardless of nationality. But criminal behaviour by individuals is not a basis for judging entire communities, nor does it explain the broader social and economic problems facing Ireland.
By this point, the weakness of the anti-migrant argument should be clear. The people blamed for housing shortages did not create the housing crisis. The people blamed for overstretched hospitals are helping to staff them. The people blamed for labour shortages are helping to fill them. The people blamed for pressure on public finances are helping to fund them. The people arriving in Ireland did not create these problems.
For generations, Irish people have emigrated in search of opportunities unavailable at home. Today, many migrants come to Ireland for exactly the same reason. The deeper problem is not migration itself, but an economy that struggles to retain the workers it trains while failing to meet many of the social needs of those who remain.
A society cannot deport its way out of housing shortages. It cannot deport its way out of healthcare waiting lists. It cannot deport its way out of poor planning, underinvestment or economic dysfunction. The solution to Ireland’s problems will not be found in blaming those who arrive, whatever the reason or circumstance, but in confronting the conditions that force so many people to migrate from their home.
References
- CSO, Business in Ireland 2025: Labour Market and Social Sustainability (2026).
- Oxford Economics, The Economic, Labour Market and Skills Impacts of Migrant Workers in Northern Ireland (2009); Migration Observatory, University of Oxford, Migrants in the UK Labour Market: An Overview (2026).
- Department of Health, National Healthcare Statistics 2025 (2025).
- Hynes et al., ‘Self-sufficiency in the Healthcare Workforce’, Human Resources for Health (2025).
- NHS Northern Ireland, Workforce Statistics (2024).
- CSO, Distribution of Earnings by Nationality 2024 (2025).
- CSO, Ireland and the EU at 50: Migration Statistics (2023).
- CSO, Population and Migration Estimates 2025 (2025).
