What would it mean as a policy for Irish people to expect that the bottom 10 percent of jobs be taken up by immigrants?
J ournalist Fintan O’Toole has an odd suggestion for readers of the Irish Times, which is that Irish people are now too good for the “crap jobs” that they used to do as immigrants and as natives, and so Ireland needs to continue a policy of mass immigration. The “bottom 10 per cent of jobs are neither fulfilling nor well paid — and the great majority of Irish-born people neither want nor need to do them.”
If we were serious about stopping people coming here to work in low-paid jobs, we would have to be willing to do three things. One would be to greatly increase the number of Irish early school leavers — not, I think, a social policy any party is going to advocate. The second would be to abolish crap jobs by hugely improving wages and conditions for those at the bottom — and consequently paying much higher prices for the services they provide. And the third would be to conscript all Conor McGregor’s “Ireland for the Irish” fans into a standing army of toilet cleaners, social care workers, fruit and vegetable pickers, Deliveroo couriers, security guards, chambermaids, meat factory butchers and kitchen porters. Instead of flipping Vs at dark-skinned people, they could flip burgers for Ireland.
What’s odd here is O’Toole’s conflicted mind. On the one hand, he has something of a democratic socialist in him who wishes that wage minimums or subsidies made crap jobs less crappy. On the other, he relishes in the idea of forcing people of low-status political opinions into low-status occupations.
But has he thought seriously about what it would mean as a policy for Irish people to expect that the bottom 10 percent of jobs be taken up by immigrants? It seems not.
Consider, on the one hand, the supply of labor and demand. If Irish people don’t want to be Deliveroo drivers full time, the price of that food-courier service will go way up. If it stays low but Irish aspirations remain high, it could be that it is the type of job that teenagers or college students take as part-time work. The fast-food work I did part-time as a teenager is now done in America by immigrants almost exclusively.
But then there is the other fact. O’Toole would essentially have a policy where the native Irish benefit overwhelmingly from the formation given by Ireland’s institutions, its schooling, and the social structure, which would somehow unsuit them to the bottom 10 percent of jobs. Then they would import the tired, poor, huddled masses from elsewhere to take up the entire bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.
Lots of other nations have tried having a racialized helot class; it tends not to go well in a democracy, and particularly not in one like Ireland where a modicum of equality is still prized as a social and political goal. It doesn’t just breed resentment in natives who can’t all be above average and do have to compete for low-wage work. It also stores resentment in the immigrants and in their sons and daughters, who will sense that even as they legally become “native,” the prole status that enabled and justified their migration into the country still sticks to them somewhat.
The problem could be even worse in Ireland than in other European nations, given the peculiar nature of Irish class conflict. This dynamic is rarely acknowledged or analyzed even though, in my view of it as an outsider, it is the one seriously oppressive and unpleasant feature of Irish social life. In nations such as England, class differences seem to smooth social conflict by facilitating people of different manners from even encountering each other. In Ireland, class is everything from the trainers you are wearing to each vowel pronunciation in your accent. People rank each other in almost every social interaction among strangers, and often even among friends. The only thing that smoothed it over was religion, which consoled the industrious and the poor equally with God’s favor.
But now that the common Irish opinion is that religion was a foreign nuisance, there is something harsher in the social atmosphere. It can be detected in the disdain from O’Toole’s column, and it bodes ill for a future in which Ireland embarks on all the problems of integration faced by its European peers, with fewer resources and, if this column is any indication, apparently even less self-awareness.