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This article locates Ireland's relatively recent experience with mass immigration within a comparative West European context. It poses two questions: To what degree has Ireland become a ‘normal’ country of immigration? What does the Irish case reveal about the contemporary politics of migration to Western Europe? The article's main finding is that Ireland's experience with mass immigration since the 1990s appears to be following a political trajectory similar to that of the traditional immigration-receiving states, despite being separated from the latter by as many as four decades. This said, the evidence suggests that some of the policy challenges precipitated by mass immigrant settlement may be currently arriving earlier in time than previously.
Acknowledgements
This article was informed by the invaluable research provided by Michelle Fordice and Meghan Sweeney and significantly improved as a result of the incisive criticisms and suggestions offered by two anonymous referees and an editor of this journal.
Notes
1. These countries include the Central European countries, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia (Wallace and Stola Citation2001) as well as the Mediterranean countries of Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal (Venturini 2004).
2. Ireland was the last among the original 15 European Union member states to become a country of net immigration (Ruhs Citation2004: 2).
3. The percentage of Irish women in the workforce increased from 29.7 per cent to 52.8 per cent from 1981 to 2006 (Healy Citation2007).
4. During this brief period the unemployment rate in Ireland descended from the highest to the lowest among EU countries.
5. Contemporary guest worker programmes are often referred to as temporary migrant worker programmes (TMWPs).
6. In January 2008 The Irish government decided not to ‘opt in’ to an EU Blue Card system that is intended to attract high-skill immigrants to the EU (Smyth Citation2008).
7. The largest groups of asylum seekers in Ireland during the past half dozen years or so have come from Nigeria and Romania.
8. According to Fanning and Mutwarasibo (2007: 447), the core of the argument was that ‘immigrants stereotyped as asylum-seekers were exploiting the Irish health system to gain access to Irish citizenship’.
9. Seventy-eight per cent of respondents in 2003 and 66 per cent of respondents in 2006 reported that they had not personally witnessed racist behaviour (Millard Brown Citation2006).
10. The political impulse to balance the goal of immigration control with the need to facilitate the incorporation of settled immigrants in Ireland is echoed in the early experience of post-World War II migration to Britain (Messina Citation1989: 42–4).
11. The 2004 Nationality and Citizenship Act was founded on the result of the June 2004 popular referendum that proposed amending the 2001 Citizenship Act so that children born in Ireland to non-Irish national parents would have to wait three years before becoming eligible for citizenship (Garner Citation2007b: 124–7).
12. Most of the traditional immigration-receiving countries, for example, are and have been since their founding ethnically heterogeneous (Esman Citation1977; Rudolph and Thompson Citation1989).
13. In 2007 Rotimi Adebari, a Nigerigan-born immigrant and the first African to be elected to the position of Mayor, in Portlaoise, was invited to a reception in Leinster House by the Ceann Comhairle, John O'Donoghue TD.
14. This general environment of toleration may be changing with respect to EU migrant workers, however. In April, 2008 tens of thousands of resident EU migrant workers were granted the right to vote in general and local elections on the condition that they can demonstrate a mastery of English.
15. Freeman (1995: 886) refers to this phenomenon as the immigration policy cycle.