Nine Million Vacant Homes
No, not the title of a new Jesus And Mary Chain song. It’s the title of an article about vacant houses in Japan. (And an article on why it's right to curb asylum seeking.)
Nine million vacant homes and zero asylum seekers. Not quite, but almost. Here's a fact: Japan gave refugee status to a record 303 people in 2023. See this CNN piece: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/05/07/asia/akiya-homes-problem-japan-intl-hnk Meanwhile Ireland, which does have a significant number of vacant properties - but a tiny fraction compared to Japan - granted asylum to 60% of the 5197 applicants last year. That's just over 3000. Ten times the Japanese figure.
What's interesting here is that Japan is regarded by political analysts as a Western country. But as always, only Western Western countries are expected to give in to the asylum demands of anyone that arrives at our shores. The real figure for people arriving in Ireland are worse. Before you formally apply for asylum you're in a kind of political limbo. You're in. Now go sleep somewhere.
But where? That's the problem we're facing. And why we're seeing all the social agitation around properties like hotels being used to accomodate people with no legal right to be here other than a dubious refugee claim. We're not facing up to this very crisis well. As it is we can barely house our native population and the huge number of immigrants that are here and who hold high-skill jobs and/or European passports.
There is a calculation to be made that turns our usual thinking on its head. The humanistic approach is to look at the asylum numbers and try to see them as a tiny fraction of the population, so just do our best to help them. The other approach, which I believe is more rational, is to see that the asylum seekers are a tiny proportion of the population of the countries they came from. It is the duty of those countries to look after their own people. Not ours. No, that's not begging the question.
The long term solution to asylum numbers isn't to take in more people, it's to help the countries where the people are coming from. The key to ending this crisis is global prosperity and peace. Not crowded hotels in Irish towns. (There is another approach: fine the countries where the asylum seekers come from. Hardly workable...)
We’re going to reach a point where we either accept that bringing peace and prosperity to the world isn't possible and then try to accomodate all the refugees in the world - or we accept that there is little we can do either way and so we need to guard our borders. Worsening our own situation isn't a solution to a global crisis. We're part of that globe too.
I listened to Ivana Bacik talking about Labour's position on this topic the other day. Bacik needs a debate with someone that isn't a right-wing nutjob in a balaclava and sunglasses.
GS