78% want permit system for EU migrants

ambro25

Alun wrote:

Which is contrary to what it says here ...
(etc.)

The issue of the thread is not residence, it is employment. My point to Calina was merely informative, not quite on-topic. So, resuming and quoting from your (quite good) source:

Regardless of your place of residence, as a European Union worker you are entitled to take up an activity as an employed person in any Member State under the same conditions as nationals . Equal treatment applies to all conditions governing employment and work (e.g. remuneration, dismissal, occupational reintegration or re-employment after being unemployed).

The principle of equal treatment in access to employment implies that you have the same priority as nationals for access to employment in any Member State. This means that national provisions limiting the number or percentage of foreigners who may be employed do not apply to you. Consequently, when in a Member State the granting of any benefit to enterprises is subject to a minimum percentage of national workers, you are regarded as a national worker.

In addition, EC law states that any clause of a collective or individual agreement or of any other collective regulation concerning eligibility for employment, employment, remuneration and other conditions of work or dismissal shall be null and void in so far as it lays down or authorises discriminatory conditions in respect of workers who are nationals of other Member States.

Whether the Member State (operatively: the Republic of Ireland) decides to place particularly burdensome administrative requirements upon 'residence' or not, for instance to indirectly discourage economic migration, one thing for certain is that such may not override the above and the relevant Treaty provisions.

I would therefore imagine that work permits for EU citiziens (for I am unaware of 'classes' of EU citizens, e.g. Poor Easterner vs Rich Westerners - at leats in Law) would contravene the said Treaty provisions, in a rather smelly way.

Calina

ambro25 wrote:

Correct if you are not a EU citizen, and reciprocally incorrect otherwise:

Pretty much like most other EU countries, as a matter of fact.

You stand corrected.

Then it has changed since I last resided in France when in fact, it was necessary for me as an EU citizen to have and carry a carte de séjour. Strangely enough, I found their system the easiest to deal with, and by contrast, had much grief with the Belgian system. The German system was not so bad.

shoegirl

ronbyrne2005 wrote:

in the longer run many of the american companies in ireland will locate in eastern europe asia etc and shut operations here,im very pessimistic about the future of the irish economy and eu and american economies as a whole,all manufacturing will be outsourced to cheaper locations and unless a country is excellent in research/innovation/technology/services which i dont think ireland is, they will struggle to create economic growth,even jobs which require degrees such as computer or finance related jobs can be outsourced to highly educated graduates in china india etc and this will continue to happen

....in which cases the migrant workers will probably follow the jobs to those countries. Inward immigration into Ireland is not likely to sustain itself.
Also many EU migrants go back home - and are replaced by other EU migrants. Many are likely to go home when things improved at home - just like Irish emmigrants have been doing for the last 10 years.
Secondly, most non-EU workers only have permits through their employers, and they will be forced to leave when these expire and their employers are no longer able to renew their permits due to workers here being unavailable.

We have one root cause for this whole situation by the way - a shortage of workers.
Why? I think there are 2 reasons:
1. Felxibility demands - mobility and work pattern requirements prevent many people from taking up many jobs.
For example, if you live more than 3 miles outside Cork city (or even live in the city and work 3 miles out), its impossible to get a bus to start work earlier than 8am. This makes it impossible to work in most factories which demand an 7am start (and most refuse to change their patterns to attract workers). So you either need a car, or need to be able to live closeby. Since its more expensive for the Irish person who owns a house or lives with family to move, they will look for work at home.
Secondly, many Irish people are more likely to want a permanent role - temp work has poor conditions and isn't seen as attractive. Irish people are still used to 39 hr or less weeks and sick pay entitlements - which many newly arrived workers may not be accustomed to.
2. Expensive accomodation and living costs preventing social welfare recipients from moving into work -
The net social welfare rates are quite low - however excessive rents in the private sector hike up the net payments to a level for households of 2 of more to a level well above the minimum wage. For many people this quite simply means that work does not pay. (Secondarily, and of serious concern, every penny of the uplift for private rents is going into the pockets of private landlords whose sole motive is to maximise profit). The medical card impact varies as some people don't suffer from much ill health, but if they do then the impact is heavy - even a person with moderately bad asthma can spend 85 a month on medication quite easily. Likewise, childcare costs are a major barrier to women with children returning to the workforce.

However the reality is, that any attempt to improve affordability of accomodation or broaden access to cheap childcare would dent the massive gravy train of cash for landlords and childcare providers - and just look at how many TDs are amateur landlords with a vested interest in keeping the business highly profitable. So inevitably it remains a vested interest for many TDs to encourage mobile workers over from abroad, who will not only take up those jobs, (and in many cases work in businesses belonging to TDs) but also afford more profits for our current generation of rack-renting landlords and high-cost, low-quality childcare. So don't blame the foreigners!

ambro25

shoegirl wrote:

Secondly, most non-EU workers only have permits through their employers, and they will be forced to leave when these expire and their employers are no longer able to renew their permits due to workers here being unavailable.

Not looking to nitpick (and I'd actually class myself as 'for' migrations rather than 'against ), but I'm not following your logic in the excerpt above: surely if there is a dearth of workers ((...) workers here being unavailable.), then one would expect their employers to be able to renew the permits in question (else how are the employers going to get things done?)...

mayhem#

Bigots....

E.

shoegirl

ambro25 wrote:

Not looking to nitpick (and I'd actually class myself as 'for' migrations rather than 'against ), but I'm not following your logic in the excerpt above: surely if there is a dearth of workers ((...) workers here being unavailable.), then one would expect their employers to be able to renew the permits in question (else how are the employers going to get things done?)...

My point was that for non-EU migrants, the Irish system is already extremely restrictive.
Why extend this to EU migrants also?

bonkey

fly_agaric wrote:

I think the other times that poorer countries joined the EU their populations were relatively smaller (would Spain, Ireland, Greece, and Portugal spaced out over a decade or so add up to anything like Poland + all the other accession states joining at once - the UK was not a poor country when it joined). Also, they joined during Europe's (esp. Germany's) post-war economic expansion. Economic growth in Europe is not at anything like the levels it was at back then.

Agreed. However, I will point out that both before and since the accession states have joined, our economy has outstripped the larger, less-likely-to-be-effected populations such as Germany and France...all of whom implemented these "sensible" protectionary limits.

It seems that the evidence of the reality is difference to the claim.

I know we're going through a kind of belated economic miracle at the moment but we can't hope to do much to help raise the living standards of a population which is about 20 times larger than our own.

Nor do we have to. The initial barriers erected by EU nations was for a short duration (2 years, if memory serves). Once that runs out, the game changes, and we're no longer alone. Not only that, but if the other EU nations decide to erect subsequent barriers, then we will have (as we did before) the opportunity to decide to join them or not.

Last time round, the Irish government outplayed the rest of the field. They looked at the duration, looked at the risk, went for it, and came out on top.

I'm not saying they should remain tied to this strategy from here on out, but I think its unsupportable to say they did the wrong thing then when they've beaten every other player in terms of results, nor is it fair to projcet the current situation into the future when one way or another the game changes once the current barriers erected in other nations expire.

If you think the French and Germans are going to open their borders to the accession states in the same way that we have you are dreaming or smoking something good.

I'm undecided, but I'm leaning towards believing that they will either look to set limits that are based on the total foreign percentage in the country (which will then be dependant on the percentage already there), or they will indeed open up their borders. After all, if your economy is down the tubes, its highly unlikely that someone is gonna choose to go for a better life there then somewhere else nearby with better conditions.

Whats the worst that can happen? Their economies continue to refuse to improve...in which case the Eu is effectively doomed anyway. On the other hand, dropping protectionist barriers raised against foreign workers could be just the impetus needed to force their workforces to accept that working a short week with a high wage is simply not economically viable, no matter how fervently one believes in a socialist State.

Their politicians will find some way to defer the evil day and ignore the hell that Poland etc will raise over it. Either that or be booted out faster than you can say "general election".

Fine...but if and when they do that, teh state of play will change. It is at that point, once we have the knowledge of what is happening, that we can make a meaningful decision as to how to proceed.

If the EU goes on to make the two-tier mode effectively permanent, then I would agree that we can choose which tier to throw our lot in, whilst cautioning that neither is particularly attractive in the long term.

If they drop their barriers instead, as they're supposed to, then we would be foolhardy in the extreme to suggest that the best path would be to swap positions with them, and erect our barriers.

If a new hybrid / compromise path is chosen, we cannot meaningfully base our strategy on anythnig less than the knowledge of what hybrid is being considered.

To sum up, I can understand why someone would put an election platform promise of wanting to implement very high immigration controls, because it plays to the most crowds whilst still realistically leaving the most room to actually manouever in come decision time.

However, the whole Chicken Little approach just doesn't make sense to me. Peolpe caution us about the imminent failure of a system with precious little to back up these claims other than some fear that it might all go wrong in a future where the status quo regarding imigration controls across Europe remains indefinitely the same. Thats not our future, so I hardly see how it backs up the argument.

jc

ronbyrne2005

theres nothing wrong with immigration per se.the problem is ireland is too small to have a completely open labour market.wages ARE under pressure from new arrivals to ireland and this will escalate as has been seen everywhere where new immigrants have arrived such as in usa, but we as a small nation cant sustain this,it makes the rich richer and the poor poorer as wages for low skill jobs stay at low levels rather than increase to attract labour in a tight labour market and wages for skilled workers are prevented from rising and stagnate or decline in real terms.
look at the immigrnat workers in germany(geisterbiester)holland etc from turkey(around 5 million of them) they stayed in germany after moving there for work,they just brought their families and never went home when economy slowed down.
anyone who thinks "just let everyone in from everywhere" is a shortsighted fool. the fact that many irish emmigrated is irrelevant,they moved to massive countries who could easily deal with hundreds of thousands of immigrants,we cant! our infrastructure/housing/public services etc can barely support us let alone another couple of hundred thousand immigrants.
the cheap immigrant workers may be driving economic growth but who's benefitting? only land lords and business owners.they usually arent on great wages so they dont pay much tax,they drive up accomadtion and hence house prices.

ronbyrne2005

shoegirl wrote:

My point was that for non-EU migrants, the Irish system is already extremely restrictive.
Why extend this to EU migrants also?

people want to extend it because we are a small economy and allowing masses of labour prepared to undercut your and every other job isnt a gret idea for the average worker,its great for the vested interests like business owners and landlords. most of these immigrants start working in low skill/low pay jobs but as they get used to the culture and get the language etc they will move to more high skill jobs (they are usually skilled but have to start in low pay employment)and undercut people there. im not against them if the wages of irish employees continue to grow at the rate of inflation plus productivity gains and if they dont cause an increase in housing costs or are a drain on our public services.

ronbyrne2005

mayhem# wrote:

Bigots....

E.

very constructive argument there

So what if 78% want a permit system? That has no bearing on if Ireland actually needs a permit system or not.

Most people don't have much of a clue on immigration.

We should listen to what the experts on the issue have to say, rather than polling the Sun-educated population to find out their "informed" answer is, to what is probably a ridiculously biased question anyway.

Delboy05

Deleted User wrote:

So what if 78% want a permit system? That has no bearing on if Ireland actually needs a permit system or not.

Most people don't have much of a clue on immigration.

We should listen to what the experts on the issue have to say, rather than polling the Sun-educated population to find out their "informed" answer is, to what is probably a ridiculously biased question anyway.

Polls are skewed to take in as broad a spectrum of the various groupings within a population as possible, thats why they're usually accurate to within a few points.....maybe u should stop reading The Mirror!!!!

If the poll went the other way, i doubt the pro-immigration lobby would be saying we need to listen to the experts and not the people. And who are the 'experts'.....this country is'nt very good when it comes to 'experts'....check out the latest LUAS line screw ups-we had our top rail 'experts' working on that project ......

fly_agaric

bonkey wrote:

Agreed. However, I will point out that both before and since the accession states have joined, our economy has outstripped the larger, less-likely-to-be-effected populations such as Germany and France...all of whom implemented these "sensible" protectionary limits.

It seems that the evidence of the reality is difference to the claim.

We were already in the middle of a boom (unlike most of the rest of the EU), and the immigrants supplied more labour to keep it going.
I'd like to make clear I was entering this thread with the thought that the barriers that most of the rest of the rest of the EU put up to free movement of these workers made sense for them (IMO), and we can't count on them being removed, not to argue the case that we should have had similar barriers at that time.

bonkey wrote:

I'm undecided, but I'm leaning towards believing that they will either look to set limits that are based on the total foreign percentage in the country (which will then be dependant on the percentage already there), or they will indeed open up their borders.

I disagree. The German and French governments don't want more people voting for the political extremes - which are continuing to increase their political support in both countries by exploiting both xenophobia and fears about "globalisation" (buzzword!:)). I really can't see it being easy for governments to weaken barriers to immigration in either country even though I'd say that is what they would prefer to do.

bonkey wrote:

After all, if your economy is down the tubes, its highly unlikely that someone is gonna choose to go for a better life there then somewhere else nearby with better conditions.

This statement would imply that an easing of the restrictions across the EU will not relieve the pressure on Sweden, the UK, and us? Anyway, I don't agree. Their economies may not be growing very much but they are far from being "down the tubes".

Wages and working conditions in Germany for example would be so much better than home in any case that I'm sure plenty of well educated E. Europeans will be willing to take a punt on snagging a job given the chance. Anyway, it looks like our 2-year bar on social welfare for immigrants won't stand up so what's to stop them availing of Germany's welfare state in the meantime if they can't get a job.

bonkey wrote:

On the other hand, dropping protectionist barriers raised against foreign workers could be just the impetus needed to force their workforces to accept that working a short week with a high wage is simply not economically viable, no matter how fervently one believes in a socialist State.

Bit of a shock-therapy for the German and French workforce! Introduce alot of new eager-beaver immigrants to compete for jobs at the same time as you take a knife and an axe to some of the red-tape and cushy benefits surrounding labour law in both countries. The reaction in terms of protests, strikes, and general mayhem should be quite something!

bonkey wrote:

However, the whole Chicken Little approach just doesn't make sense to me. Peolpe caution us about the imminent failure of a system with precious little to back up these claims other than some fear that it might all go wrong in a future where the status quo regarding imigration controls across Europe remains indefinitely the same. Thats not our future, so I hardly see how it backs up the argument.

That's just it. When it comes to immigration the complexities mean that nobody can tell what will be too much or what the exact consequences will be! And yet people seem to use this as some sort of argument that the ideal approach is always "suck it and see!" - as free as possible until there is a problem (oops - too late!) because our worries may never come to pass. The funny thing is, if I may make a generalisation, such people seem to usually be on the left of the political spectrum and are extremely cautious when it comes to regulation of businesses and markets etc!

fly_agaric

bonkey wrote:

Agreed. However, I will point out that both before and since the accession states have joined, our economy has outstripped the larger, less-likely-to-be-effected populations such as Germany and France...all of whom implemented these "sensible" protectionary limits.

It seems that the evidence of the reality is difference to the claim.

We were already in the middle of a boom (unlike most of the rest of the EU), and the immigrants supplied more labour to keep it going.
I'd like to make clear I was entering this thread with the thought that the barriers that most of the rest of the rest of the EU put up to free movement of these workers made sense for them (IMO), and we can't count on them being removed, not to argue the case that we should have had similar barriers at that time.

bonkey wrote:

I'm undecided, but I'm leaning towards believing that they will either look to set limits that are based on the total foreign percentage in the country (which will then be dependant on the percentage already there), or they will indeed open up their borders.

I disagree. The German and French governments don't want more people voting for the political extremes - which are continuing to increase their political support in both countries by exploiting both xenophobia and fears about "globalisation" (buzzword!:)). I really can't see it being easy for governments to weaken barriers to immigration in either country even though I'd say that is what they would prefer to do.

bonkey wrote:

After all, if your economy is down the tubes, its highly unlikely that someone is gonna choose to go for a better life there then somewhere else nearby with better conditions.

This statement would imply that an easing of the restrictions across the EU will not relieve the pressure on Sweden, the UK, and us? Anyway, I don't agree. Their economies may not be growing but they are far from being "down the tubes".

Wages and working conditions in Germany for example would be so much better in any case that I'm sure plenty of well educated E. Europeans will be willing to take a punt on snagging a job given the chance. Anyway, it looks like our 2-year bar on social welfare for immigrants won't stand up so what's to stop them availing of Germany's welfare state in the meantime if they can't get a job.

bonkey wrote:

On the other hand, dropping protectionist barriers raised against foreign workers could be just the impetus needed to force their workforces to accept that working a short week with a high wage is simply not economically viable, no matter how fervently one believes in a socialist State.

Bit of a shock-therapy for the German and French workforce! Introduce alot of new eager-beaver immigrants to compete for jobs at the same time as you take a knife and an axe to some of the red-tape and cushy benefits surrounding labour law in both countries. The reaction in terms of protests, strikes, and general mayhem should be quite something!

bonkey wrote:

However, the whole Chicken Little approach just doesn't make sense to me. Peolpe caution us about the imminent failure of a system with precious little to back up these claims other than some fear that it might all go wrong in a future where the status quo regarding imigration controls across Europe remains indefinitely the same. Thats not our future, so I hardly see how it backs up the argument.

That's just it. When it comes to immigration the complexities mean that nobody can tell what will be too much or what the exact consequences will be! And yet people seem to use this as some sort of argument that the approach is always "suck it and see!" - as free as possible until there is a problem (oops - too late!). The funny thing is, if I may make a generalisation, such people seem to usually be on the left of the political spectrum and are extremely cautious when it comes to regulation of businesses and markets etc!

ambro25

fly_agaric wrote:

Bit of a shock-therapy for the German and French workforce! Introduce alot of new eager-beaver immigrants to compete for jobs at the same time as you take a knife and an axe to some of the red-tape and cushy benefits surrounding labour law in both countries.

Erm, as an aside to the thread topic but in direct relation to this part of your post: can't speak for Germany as it's too long since I lived and worked there, but I can promise you that France needs it really badly...

fly_agaric wrote:

The reaction in terms of protests, strikes, and general mayhem should be quite something!

True enough, but (-and again in respect of France only) part and parcel of the "knife and an axe to some of the red-tape and cushy benefits" should include curtailment of right to strike and major reform of dole and all of these little subsisting 'corporatist' advantages (e.g. such as 1925-ish -obtained 'coal allowance' for train drivers, FFS!).

(though I would happily accept a pro-immigration label, do you now find me conservative enough, re. your last sentence? )

As an ex-company owner in France (which was moderately labour-intensive), and bearing in mind my Dad still runs his own (again, moderately labour-intensive) in France, I'll tell you this: I didn't, and still wouldn't, care one flying f*ck if the guy who wants to work for me is white/ brown/ black/ green/ purple, if he is East-European EU or Chinese on a permit - so long as he is wanting to put in a day's honest work for a day's honest pay, instead of just 'upping his stats in the system' so he can go back on the dole/benefits next month :mad:

fly_agaric

^^Nice to hear about this stuff from someone with proper personal experience (unlike me).
I wouldn't be arguing against the fact that things have to change - just that such changes combined with stiff competition from immigrants may just be too much for people to take all at once. The reforms should happen (easier said than done), then if these seem to be working they can free up immigration if the supply of labour begins to get tight.

About left and right and immigration - I suppose less nationalistic/traditional right-wing types believe that free movement of labour will mean that that businesses will never be held over a barrel by their workers or suffer labour shortages because the world is so full of desparate people looking for an opportunity to make their lives better (see Bush and his affection for mexican immigrants while others in his party grind their teeth).

ateam

I just read on the net that the Labour Party asked for the deportation of the Nigerian student to be Stopped in March 2005.

Now Labour are asking for permits on foreign workers coming into the country...Does anyone else see the irony?

Blatant opportunism in both cases IMO.

Democracy2005

We need a work-permit system because the number of migrants from the new EU states exceeds IBEC/Government assessment of our "need" for workers by 3 or 4 to one (i.e. 30,000-50,000).