Richard Boyd Barrett: Scapegoating Migrants and Human Cost of Deportations

Yeah, Donald Trump is scapegoating people fleeing asylum seekers, migrants, to deflect anger away from the failure of people like him and the billionaires that he represents to address the cost of living crisis and scapegoating vulnerable immigrants or people seeking asylum in the most horrendous way, or people who are undocumented, including Irish people. And we've seen the consequences of that now with Seamus Culleton being treated, as he describes it, in a modern-day concentration camp. That's what Trump is about. And this government is leading into that stuff. It's not as absolutely blatant and obscene as what he's doing, but it's leaning into it. And the human consequences, just as they are for Seamus Culleton, are appalling. Somebody who's working in the United States wasn't documented. So, yes, you know, probably hadn't got everything that's necessary for him to be deemed fully legal, but he's contributing, right? He's contributing. He wants to contribute to American society, and we all rightly are appalled that he should be treated in this way because we understand that he's going to contribute, as have millions of Irish people have contributed all over the world to the countries they've gone to. But then we say there's too many of these people coming to Ireland. The hypocrisy and double standards is appalling, and the human consequences are terrible. I raised the case of Bilal Butt here back earlier this year, of a guy who'd been here living and working. He's got two kids. His kids were born here, have lived all their lives here. His partner and so on was locked up for 50 days pending his deportation. Now, this is a guy who's contributing to our society. There's no value for him or his children in deporting him. And I warned at the time that his health was in danger, and I've written to the minister who's sitting there looking on his phone, three times about Bilal. Okay, okay. I still haven't had a response to the communications I sent to you about Bilal. But, as I said, his family were worried he was going to have a heart attack, and he did have a heart attack. He was in ICU, and he had a heart attack. Now, he's out of prison, thankfully. But, I mean, this is a guy who's working. His employer wants him to continue to work. He's contributed. There's just no, there's nothing good about deporting him. Or, the family I've been also asked to mention, I believe Deputy Batchett mentioned him earlier on, the family of Titileo, Oloquemi, Oyaquemi, and her three sons, Samuel, Joseph, and Genesis. She was training as a healthcare worker, had a QQ level 5 in healthcare, hoping to work as a care assistant. One of her sons, I think, was just about to do his leaving cert, and now they've been packed up to be deported and thrown out of the country. It's just brutal stuff. But it's, you know, echoing what Trump is doing, and leaning into all this stuff. And we heard statements, the former Minister of Finance, who's now left to go off with the World Bank, saying there was too many immigrants in Ireland, and so on. It's just leaning into this stuff. And it's, and what, the far right, the toxic agenda of the far right. But the truth about immigrants coming into this country, I mean, first of all, the number of asylum applicants is tiny, right? It's down to 13,000 last year, 18,000 the year before. But it's a tiny proportion of the number of people who are coming in to the country in the first place, which I think was 149,000 in 2024. So it's a very, very small number. But as Michael Taft points out, in a very, very good article I'd encourage people to read, just to the end of the last, the perverse logic of the government's immigration policy, he just sort of details how every serious study that's been done anywhere in the world shows that the benefits of inward immigration far, far outweigh in any country, as was the case with the Ireland going abroad, this is true here, it's true everywhere, that people coming into a country, the economic benefit to that country is far, far in excess. It's multiples of any of the costs involved. And this should be obvious when you look at, you know, the contribution that immigrants in this country are making to our health services, to construction, to hospitality, to retail. I mean, literally, in this country, we would not be able to function without immigrants. We are facing labour and skills shortages in every single area of Irish society. And these are people who want to contribute to our society. We have government bodies and saying, actually, I mean, I'm in the Budget Scrutiny Committee, and the Budget Scrutiny Committee is studying how the ageing population in this country and the lack of young people is going to be a massive problem, is becoming a massive problem, because the working population is declining as a proportion of the overall population. We're getting older, right? So we need immigrants in order to sustain the working population, to be able to pay for the pensions and all of the other things that we need. So it makes no sense to be leaning into this stuff and suggesting that immigrants or asylum seekers are somehow causing a problem. And it's the government essentially trying to deflect attention away from their failure to address the housing crisis, or indeed their culpability for the housing crisis in the first place. And just one last point I just want to make is, you know, when you look at the numbers, 149,000 inward immigration, 13,000, as I said, applications for asylum. Do you know how many tourists came here in 2024? Six million. Six million. Now, is anybody running around saying, we've got to stop the tourists coming in because they're such a problem? No, we all recognise they bring an economic benefit, even if they also rely on the infrastructure and so on. Here, that exact argument applies to a far, far small number, smaller number of people seeking asylum or immigrants coming into this country. We should stop the scapegoating and leaning into the far rise and the toxic politics of Trump. Keeper. Keeper.