Time for a zero refugee policy? - *Read OP for mod warnings and threadbans - updated 11/5/24*

Oh absolutely. One could speculate that the housing crisis has just provided them with the opportunity to air their views in a more friendly environment.

Having posted here a good bit I'd say it's a lot of posters. Not all, I appreciate there are people with genuine concerns about housing and services.

I think it's worth noting how many houses we're short of in the country too. I think the average figure given in various housing reports is about 250k.

Yet we're putting this much into talking about a very small fraction of that number for people here legally.

Great post 👍

As mentioned, given there's an estimated shortfall of 250k houses, the suggestion that kicking out 6,000 asylum seekers is the solution to that problem instead of building more houses is an interesting one.

Exactly .

The issue is not legal migration !

That is what is encompassed in that percentage figure.

It's sickening, more and more money is spent while our national debt is among the highest in the world

These "people" are just clueless to reality

Besides the housing crisis there's so much issues with local GPs, health care, school placing and so on which are all getting stretched beyond breaking point at this stage

I thought all these asylum seekers were young men of military going age, how can they be taking up school places? Don't forget, no one here has an issue with legal immigration so it cant be that either. 😉

Very few, if anyone, has ever said house them all or said that everyone who applies for asylum should be granted asylum.

To take your analogy and use it against the current situation: Being unhealthy (the many issues like the housing crisis etc) and spending more and more money on eating unsustainable amounts of food. And then wondering why we're still unhealthy

That is a long term solution, no matter who is in government they are not going to magic up the number of houses needed now or in the future in the next year or 2 or maybe 5. So what happens in the mean time, just have anyone be they young irish people looking to move out of the parents house, One parent of a family that is split up that can't find accommodation, people coming to the country on work visa and Asylum seekers be they legal or illegal just all get tents so that they camp out on streets, canals and parks? Unless there is a slow down in people either coming into the country or as we seen in the past an upsurge in people leaving the country they will never be able to catch up on those needing housing, so in your infinite wisdom what is to be done?

People suggest things here and then you shoot them down and go to the extreme like in the quoted post so I ask you what should happen to solve the housing the crisis other than just build houses because just building houses while there are more and more people coming in not going to solve it?

This is an example of the perfect solution falacy: because the suggestion does not completely solve the problem it is therefore worthless.

In reality there is never going to be one solution but rather many partial solutions.

The point being contended here is that if you are worried about housing in the context of foreigners coming into the country — then asylum seekers / refugees represent a fairly small cohort of the overall foreign-born population in Ireland. Their effect on housing, in materiality terms, is therefore far lower than (say) migrants who come here via the conventional channels for economic migration. As well as that, at this point in time, of the foreign-born population it is those who are conventional economic migrants who are more likely to be in a position to compete with Ireland-born people in the rental market and (to a lesser extent, as migrants in Ireland are far less likely to be homeowners) house-buying market.

Nobody is saying that asylum seekers have no effect whatsoever on housing — hell — I'm not sure who here is even disagreeing with you that we should try to slow the number of asylum seekers down. But the point is that conventional economic migrants make up a far, far larger share of the foreign born population so even if your focus was on reducing their numbers as a way of easing housing demand this would make appear to make more sense than focusing on a far smaller sub-cohort of that demographic. Now I appreciate you mention work visa migrants too — but for the most part people on here tend to hyper focus on the asylum seekers / refugees as a major cause of the housing crisis (or at least elevate the prospect of their removal as being a major step towards solving it).

@ArthurDayne wrote "Nobody is saying that asylum seekers have no effect whatsoever on housing — hell — I'm not sure who here is even disagreeing with you that we should try to slow the number of asylum seekers down. But the point is that conventional economic migrants make up a far, far larger share of the foreign born population so even if your focus was on reducing their numbers as a way of easing housing demand this would make appear to make more sense than focusing on a far smaller sub-cohort of that demographic."

Perhaps not in the last few months, but arguments have been made on this thread that IPA migrants have no impact on the housing crisis on the basis that these migrants are housed in specially designated facilities for migrants such as direct provision centres etc. that don't deplete the general housing stock.

I don't think many (outside those making the argument) bought this line of reasoning but the arguments were nevertheless made.

Glad to see the "we have no problem with legal migration." trope is finally being discarded.

We need qualified people to keep our economy going so we can't stop these coming in. We are never going to build our way out of this problem. What we need to do is create large scale trailer parks like they have in the US. People will have to get used to the fact that they will live a large part of their lives in that sort of accomodation.

So your solution to the housing crisis is to get rid of a tiny percentage of people who mainly don't even live in houses as a short term solution to ensure going Irish people can move out of their parents house? I won't lie, I'm not sure that's much of a solution tbh. The reality is, the numbers just get stack up. As I've said already, getting rid of those 6,000 asylum seekers living in reception centres is going to be the solution to Irish people living in a box room.

The government have never shown any interest in building social and affordable houses. Re-electing a parties have shown no interest in doing that repeatedly is not going to solve the problem. Getting rid of a tiny percentage of asylum seekers is not going to solve the problem either.

I do accept getting rid of nearly all foreigners will go a long way though. It's absolutely ridiculous idea, but at least the numbers stack up.