Former taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said that immigration numbers have risen too quickly in Ireland.
Speaking to the University of Notre Dame’s college newspaper during a visit to the United States last weekend, the former leader of Fine Gael said people here were “right” to feel the number of immigrants had been “too big in recent years”.
He added: “A country of five million people seeing its population rise by 2 per cent a year, which is what’s happening at the moment, is too fast,” he said.
But how much has immigration actually grown by?
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Levels of inward migration have certainly seen a significant uptick, particularly since the end of the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. According to the Central Statistics Office, in the 12 months to the end of April 2023 Ireland received 141,600 immigrants – a 16-year high and the second successive 12-month period when more than 100,000 people came to live here.
Where did they come from? Returning Irish citizens accounted for 29,600; some 26,100 were other EU citizens, and 4,800 were UK citizens. The remaining 81,100 immigrants were citizens of other countries including almost 42,000 Ukrainians.
So, immigration is rising, but are our levels of immigration out of kilter with other EU states? Immigration has increased significantly across the EU since 2021 when 3.8 million people immigrated to an EU state – 2.4 million from non-EU countries and 1.4 million migrating from one EU member state to another.
A year later that had almost doubled – to almost seven million people. Some 5.1 million arrived from non-EU countries – the highest since the statistics started being gathered in this way in 2013. Another 1.5 million migrated from one EU member state to another, and 400,000 whose previous country was unknown.
Did all member states see an increase between 2021 and 2022? All but Slovakia. The highest absolute increases were in Czechia (401 per cent), Latvia (205 per cent), Estonia (153 per cent), Germany (137 per cent) and Portugal (132 per cent).
Relative to host populations, Malta had the highest rates (almost 66 immigrants per 1,000 residents), followed by Luxembourg (48 per 1,000), Estonia (37 per 1,000), Cyprus (34 per 1,000), Czechia (33 per 1,000), Lithuania (31 per 1,000 people), and, in sixth place Ireland (30 per 1,000).
So, is Ireland’s immigrant population high? According to Eurostat, which considers a non-native population of more than 10 per cent as “high”, it is at just more than 14 per cent.
In relative terms, Luxembourg had the highest immigrant population in January 2023 – accounting for 47.4 per cent. High proportions were observed in Malta (25.3 per cent), Cyprus (20 per cent), Austria (19 per cent), Estonia (17 per cent), Germany (14.6 per cent) and Ireland (14.4 per cent).
Who are Ireland’s immigrants? On January 1st, 2023, just more than half were women, with highest proportions from Poland (13.4 per cent), United Kingdom (11.8 per cent), India (7.4 per cent); Ukraine (7.4 per cent), Romania (6.2 per cent), and the remaining (53.9 per cent) from elsewhere. While the vast majority of immigrants are here to work, especially in critical areas such as health, information technology and tourism, significant numbers are seeking or in receipt of international protection – especially from Ukraine.
Across Europe, half of immigrants were aged under 31 years. On January 1st, 2023, the median age of the total population of the EU stood at 44.5 years, while it was 30.5 years for immigrants in 2022. An analysis of the age structure of immigrants by citizenship shows that, for the EU as a whole, the foreign national immigrants were younger than the national immigrants.
Eurostat notes: “Migration is influenced by a combination of economic, environmental, political and social factors: either in a migrant’s country of origin (push factors) or in the country of destination (pull factors). Historically, the relative economic prosperity and political stability of the EU are thought to have exerted a considerable pull effect on immigrants.”