IT’S MONDAY 15 December 2014 and I’m flying home for Christmas. As is traditional because of my paltry organisation skills, I’m sprinting through the airport but manage a detour to catch a glimpse at the newsstand.
The Telegraph’s splash – Labour chiefs warn MPs: don’t mention immigration – is my worst nightmare.
As the person responsible for the British Labour Party’s Targeting and Analysis team, and indeed lead author of the leaked report to which this headline relates, there isn’t a worse scenario for me.
Not only for my job security but also for the fate of the party’s careful internal strategies on the issue of immigration and navigating the threat of UKIP.
The week gets worse as a senior politician and co-author of the document claims to never have seen it.
The Telegraph runs a live feed on the unfolding scandal culminating in a shambles at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) – a weekly televised head-to-head between in this case Prime Minister David Cameron and leader of the opposition, Labour’s Ed Miliband.
During this exchange, the PM declares: “I’ve had my Christmas present a little bit earlier…” before filleting Ed Miliband over a document I had been, only days earlier, editing.
To say that the Labour Party’s imminent press conference announcing its strategy on immigration was undermined would be an understatement.
The document described on a constituency-by-constituency basis how Labour might deal with the rise of UKIP, a party capitalising primarily on the underlying salience of immigration (rather than its later stated objective to leave the EU) to voters.
The document outlined Labour’s strategic problems when it came to the issue of immigration. It was a deep analysis of all the problems the party faced going into the new year ahead of the 2015 election – and provided enough ammunition to entirely undermine the party’s immigration policy press conference later that week.
Thereafter, the party decided not to take heed of my team’s analysis on the issue and instead decided to sell mugs emblazoned with inspiring phrases such as ‘Controls on Immigration’ and to unveil an 8-ft tall granite tombstone with the same.
They say in academia that it’s important for your research to have ‘impact’. But, being honest, I’m not really sure what that means, because you can spend years researching something, doing a PhD on the depoliticisation of immigration in this example, then being fortunate enough to find the exact audience that needs it most – Labour MPs – and it can still end up as a mere tool in a larger internal power struggle.
But we carry on.
Because the politicisation and depoliticisation of immigration remains an important dynamic that affects societal cohesion.
Closer to home, this honest quote from Michael McDowell in an interview following the 2007 General Election is quite informative:
There are some issues, if I was minded to in the morning, on which I could get 10% or 12% of in the next Dáil … like if I made immigration an issue … And I am not tempted to do it because I think it would be a fairly nasty political enterprise. But you could do it …”
Fourteen years on and it remains an interesting puzzle about Irish politics – why is there yet to be a successful anti-immigration political party in Ireland?
While anti-immigration parties average approximately 12% of the vote across European democracies, they registered less than 1% at the Irish general election last year.
How and why have anti-immigration politics almost uniquely failed to take hold in Ireland?
The fact that such policies are not successful today does not necessarily mean that there isn’t latent support for this type of political party.
The recent Ireland Thinks poll for The Journal‘s Good Information Project asked whether voters would consider supporting a political party that holds strong anti-immigration views.
The results, as below, show that 14% would consider voting for such a party.
This rises to 43% of the small sample of Aontú supporters, 23% of Sinn Féin supporters, 21% of supporters of Independent or Other candidates, 25% of those living in council housing, 19% of weekly church-goers, 18% of men, and 17% of those living in Leinster.
One can look at the emergence of anti-immigration parties as a bottom-up sociological development that starts with grievances of constituents or a top-down development that begins in the political arena through public discourse.
In relation to the latter, most political systems can be quite restrictive for new parties seeking electoral representation. However, Ireland has perhaps the most open of any political system. There is no minimum threshold for representation and, as such, we have a far larger number of successfully elected independent candidates than other political systems.
While the small rump of populist right support within Sinn Féin is well-documented, the support within independent candidates is more informative in relation to how anti-immigration politics is manifested within the Irish political system.
Indeed, it is independent politicians such as Noel Grealish, Verona Murphy, Peter Casey, and Mattie McGrath that have sought to capitalise on anti-immigrant sentiment.
However, as independents they alone fail to politicise the issue as independent candidates can struggle to politicise any issue.
Furthermore, our electoral system also requires successful candidates to appeal broadly for lower preference votes that are required in order to get elected. As such, this limits the enthusiasm of any successful TD in appealing to extreme perspectives.
Converting one’s ‘consideration’ into a genuine preference would require immigration to be a salient issue. And as per the next chart we can see that immigration remains a non-salient issue among the Irish public at both EU and national levels.
So how has this come about? Why is there less interest in immigration as an issue?
Well, the politicisation of immigration is a complex issue but there are three broad strands.
The social grievance literature, although inconsistent, suggests that a combination of economic turmoil and immigration contributes to support for anti-immigration parties and increases the salience of the issue.
The most recent Census shows that over 1 in 6 residents in Ireland were born abroad – the 7th highest figure out of the 28 EU member states.
During the global financial crisis Ireland went through a deep economic turmoil and today Ireland has the highest level of pre-tax income inequality in the EU. And yet, Irish attitudes towards immigration are relatively positive.
The Irish population is currently the most positive in their appraisal of immigration from both EU member states and from outside of Europe.
There is an argument that this is a function of our history of emigration, and while perhaps there is something in that, it seems unlikely to be a particularly strong feature when we observe support for anti-immigration parties in other countries such as Poland, Austria, Germany and Slovakia which have similarly strong claims to suggest that history might inoculate them from this development.
While 60% of Irish adults report to have some experience of immigration either directly or through a family member, the relationship between this variable and one’s propensity to support an anti-immigration part is relatively weak.
Another explanation is that a concern to control immigration effecitvely emerges either ideologically or through normal policy discourse.
We also asked the public how they viewed such a demand and whether they believed a desire to control immigration reflected an underlying racism. The United States is impossibly divided on this particular issue. While 25% agreed (mainly consisting of some supporters of parties on the left) the majority, 67%, disagreed.
The final feature of support for anti-immigration parties is that it is amplified by populist support for anti-system parties. Some of the more successful anti-immigration parties such as the Austrian FPÖ or the originate of the French National Rally hail from an anti-democratic tradition.
While anti-democratic policies are unlikely to be explicitly popular, there is evidence that an added motivation for some voters is to convey their discontent with ‘the political elite’ by voting for a party that is an outcast in the political arena (see for e.g. Fennema).
In Ireland, there is no shortage of such populist opinion. The UCD/Ireland Thinks exit poll in 2020 showed that half of the voting public believed most politicians were not trustworthy and that corruption was widespread in politics.
Taken together, the dependence of far-right parties on the salience of immigration and their status outside the cordon sanitaire of respectable politics, any action to sustain the prevailing moral panic around the far-right seems likely to be counter-productive in the long-run.
So, while anti-immigration parties are not having much success in Ireland currently it is difficult to say that they will not have any success in the future.
From this, one might wonder what can be done about the emergence of anti-immigration politics in Ireland. And my answer is that, like the relationship between Irish people and immigrants, those that oppose and those that are in favour of immigration controls have more in common than they might otherwise believe.
The academic evidence suggests that effective integration policies can have a deep and lasting impact in this area. The GAA have always played a very strong role in this area. When asked about the prospect of language supports this is something that supporters of all parties from Aontú to Solidarity-PBP and everything in between agree with.
The poll was conducted on Saturday 18 September 2021.
The sample size of 1,000 consisted of responses of a listed of invited respondents of 5,000 panellists selected according to their gender, age, region, political interest, past voting behaviour, religious adherence and educational attainment.
The responses were also weighted according to these variables in line with the CSO and exit polls to ensure adequate representation.
***
Dr Kevin Cunningham is a lecturer at TU Dublin and managing director of Ireland Thinks.
***
This work is co-funded by Journal Media and a grant programme from the European Parliament. Any opinions or conclusions expressed in this work is the author’s own. The European Parliament has no involvement in nor responsibility for the editorial content published by the project. For more information, see here.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say