Housing & anti-immigrant politics: part I
Bonus post 22/04/25
This is the first of a two part series looking at the issue of immigration and housing in Ireland and the rise of anti-immigrant politics. The post goes out to paid subscribers first and to all subscribers in a fortnight.
The idea that immigration is negatively effecting housing outcomes of ‘the Irish’, and that reducing immigration is required to tackle the housing crisis, is slowly but surely making its way into the mainstream. Dan O’Brien, for example, has been arguing that migration may be inflating housing demand faster than supply can be increased, and that therefore reducing some forms of immigration should be considered.
The response to this from those on the left tends to take the following format: immigrants are not to blame for the housing crisis, the policy failures of successive Governments are (developers/banks are also blamed on occasion). From a left perspective, this has the advantage of cutting off the anti-immigration argument while at the same time putting the focus back on to Fine Gael and Fianna Fail.
But this argument is a classic ‘bait and switch’. The argument that responsibility for the crisis lies with Government does not, of itself, refute the argument that reducing immigration is required to address the housing crisis. It subtly switches the topic of debate towards the question of blame and responsibility, rather than what is actually at stake: is the current level of immigration an obstacle to solving the housing crisis?
I understand the rationale here. As someone who has pretty strong pro-immigration views, I can see the value in keeping the role of migration policy in housing off the table. Once that pandora’s box is opened, it creates an avenue for far right and other destructive ideas to enter the mainstream. If, as I suspect, the real motivation of these actors is not to address the housing issue but to normalize anger/hatred towards people of colour, do we really want to try to have a reasoned debate about an issue they are only pretending to care about?
On the other hand, I don’t believe the ‘blame the Government not immigrants’ approach is sustainable. Sooner or later the question of the impact of immigration on housing is going to have to be addressed directly. Switching the focus to the ‘who is to blame’ question will run out of road as a strategy.
In addition, the progressive perspective is typically predicated on the belief that anti-immigration sentiment is underpinned by economic issues, in this case lack of affordable housing. If we can address these economic issues, it is argued, it will undermine far-right/anti-immigrant agitators. I’m also skeptical of this argument.
To look more deeply into these issues, and to facilitate what might be a more sustainable and effective pro-immigration position, I want to draw on international and Irish research.
To start with, let’s look at the large international literature on the factors that drive support for populist and anti-immigrant parties. Before doing so, it’s worth noting that we don’t have a populist party in Ireland (not in the sense we see in the political science literature, anyway) but rather have small number of extreme right anti-immigrant groupings, as well as some level of wider public concern over immigration. Therefore, the literature on populism doesn’t necessarily apply in a straightforward manner. But it does contain valuable lessons about the role of economic and cultural factors in driving hard right politics and anti-immigrant sentiment.
Economic causes
First, let’s look at the argument that right wing populism in the advanced economies (from Trump to the AFD) is driven by economic issues. The political science literature has suggested a number of issues here:
“Globalization, neoliberalism, technological change, and so on have generated discontent and divisions among citizens by making life more insecure for the working and middle classes and privileging already highly-educated, urban dwellers over less-educated and rural ones”. (Berman, 2021)
Along the same lines:
“Rising economic insecurity and social deprivation among the left-behinds has fueled popular resentment of the political classes. This situation is believed to have made the less secure strata of society… susceptible to the anti-establishment, nativist, and xenophobic scare-mongering of populist movements, blaming ‘Them’ for stripping prosperity, job opportunities, and public services from ‘Us’.” (Inglehart and Norris, 2016)
On the face of it, there are certainly plenty of reasons to go along with this analysis. In the US, inequality has reached its highest level since the census Bureau has been tracking it and the top 1% control more wealth than the combined wealth of the American middleclass. Inequality in most OECD countries has grown since the 1980s.
Another set of factors are those relating to globalization, trade and automation, and particularly their impact on manufacturing employment (a topic very much in the spotlight at the moment). The idea here is that economic “losers” in the advanced economies blame countries such as China. China’s entry into the WTO in 2001, especially for the US, is a case in point, as exposure to Chinese competition (it is believed by some) undercut American manufacturing. Political scientists have found that Trump supporters are much less likely to have a college degree and are much more exposed to the threat of automation and globalization. Indeed, 21 of the 22 states where jobs are most vulnerable to automation voted for Trump in 2016.
Problems with economic hypothesis
On the other hand, more fine grained research has failed to identify clear causal relationships between economic inequality or related issues in the voting behaviour of populist supporters. For example, the median household income for Trump supports in 2016 was higher than for Clinton voters. And Trump supporters were less likely to be unemployed or employed part time. Work on individual-level support for populist parties in six western European countries found that employment characteristics and socio-demographics exhibited a weak empirical relationship with the populist vote (see Margalit, 2019).
Cultural causes
The other perspective that dominates the literature is the ‘cultural backlash’ hypothesis, most associated with Inglehart and Norris:
“The cultural backlash thesis suggests that the surge in votes for populist parties can be explained not as a purely economic phenomenon but in large part as a reaction against progressive cultural change… [which] triggered a backlash, especially among the older generation, white men, and less educated sectors, who sense decline and actively reject the rising tide of progressive values [and] resent the displacement of familiar traditional norms… Sectors once culturally predominant in Western Europe may react angrily to the erosion of their privileges and status”.
In terms of empirical evidence, researchers consistently identify strong connections between individuals’ views on sociocultural issues and right-wing populist voting. In Europe, immigration policy preferences are almost a perfect predictor of right-wing populist voting. In the United States, attitudes regarding African-Americans, immigrants or Muslims are the best predictors of support for President Trump.
Here it might be argued that anti-immigrant sentiment is in fact related to economic issues. Immigration can impact economic issues in a number of ways, but two potential sources of discontent are increased competition in the labour market and in terms of access to scarce resources (such as housing or healthcare). However:
“The research suggests that in Western countries, anti-immigration sentiments among natives center to a large degree on the social and cultural aspects. Where economic concerns do come into play, they rarely have to do with people’s personal economic interests and mostly concern the way immigration affects society as a whole. Thus, while immigration is a salient concern for populist voters, economic insecurity directly related to immigration is not a key explanation for this concern.” (Margalit, 2019)
The exact relationship between economic and cultural factors is not entirely clear. But it’s hard to read the evidence without coming away with the view that while the economic context matters, cultural issues are to the fore. Importantly, few of the economic factors identified in the international literature are even relevant in Ireland. Economic inequality is not growing and the economic fortunes of Ireland’s working and middle class have not been eroded by the globalization of trade or automation. On the contrary, overall globalization has had a positive impact in terms of employment, income growth etc. If there is an economic angle here, then, it is likely via resource scarcity, and issue I turn to in the next installment of this series, as well as what the evidence tells us about housing experiences of immigrants themselves.