Erica Dobbs, assistant professor of politics, studies political representation and social protection. Most recently she has, in collaboration with a team of Pomona College students, focused on this summer’s local elections in Ireland and their ramifications. At Pomona, she teaches comparative politics and focuses on European politics, social movements and democracy.
What can the 2024 Irish local elections teach us about immigration as a campaign issue?
The big question looming over the 2024 elections in Ireland was: would this be the year that far-right anti-immigration parties would finally break through? Ireland is one of just two countries in Western Europe—the other being Iceland—that had resisted the siren song of far-right populist parties. But after a massive 2023 anti-immigration riot in Dublin, opinion polling in the six months before the local elections showed that immigration and housing were the top two issues of voter concern. Those two things are increasingly connected because immigrants are viewed as crowding the indigenous population out of the housing market. What my students and I found, though, is that only four far-right anti-immigration candidates won seats in local elections, and they were all in the Dublin area.
Why has immigration played differently in Irish local politics than in other western democracies?
One relatively unique factor is how open Ireland is to immigrant political participation. Only Irish citizens can vote in national elections. However, in local elections, non-citizens can vote and stand for election. The only requirement is to have physically lived in Ireland for six months and be over the age of 18. A person does not need to have permanent residency; they could be waiting for an asylum claim to be processed and still run for office. In addition, election rules are very friendly to independents, especially at the local level, so motivated candidates don’t have to force their way past party bosses and gatekeepers.
I also think that in many ways, being a small country helps. Ireland’s population is just over five million people. To put that in perspective, Los Angeles County alone has almost double the population! In a lot of Irish communities, involvement in your local parish or sports club is a pathway to local office, and there are very few degrees of separation between residents and elected officials. So, people who are civically engaged can make the jump into Irish electoral politics fairly easily, especially given the electoral rules. Some of the most active immigrant communities in Ireland are former asylum seekers—people who were politically aware in their countries of origin, are very engaged in the communities they settled in and are quite educated. It isn’t surprising that they are running for office.
What other factors make Ireland more open to immigrants?
One reason is economic success—it is much easier to be generous to immigrants when times are good. Fundamental changes to the Irish economy, including membership in the EU, fueled unprecedented economic expansion and demand for workers starting in the 1990s. It also helps that Ireland is the only English-speaking country in the eurozone and has very favorable corporate tax laws. Therefore, many American multinational tech firms are headquartered in Dublin, and they have been a magnet for migration as well. That said, Dublin is in a housing crisis that has drawn comparison to San Francisco’s. So that generosity is being sorely tested.
I think another important reason why the Irish have been so open, especially compared to neighboring countries, is their sense of empathy that stems from being a country of emigration for so long. For most of its modern history, Ireland has been a country of net out-migration. In the mid-19th century alone, nearly two million people emigrated to the U.S. in response to the Great Famine, and for much of the 20th century, mass unemployment fueled cycles of emigration as late as the 1980s. Even today, you’d be hard-pressed to encounter an Irish person who didn’t have at least one family member living abroad. This shared experience of emigration gets used by both pro-immigration and anti-immigration forces. Some people say, “We were starving and other countries took us in, so now it’s our turn. Other places absorbed us. Now we’re rich, and it’s time to absorb other people.” On the opposite side, some claim that the Irish went abroad to work, but too many immigrants come to Ireland so they can leech off the state. Those kinds of narratives are depressingly familiar.
Do you see any parallels between what is happening in Ireland and what we might expect in the U.S. elections this year?
One thing that’s been quite striking is the extent to which there is a playbook that is developed, refined and shared between far-right parties and candidates in Europe and the U.S. A key tactic developed by the Trump administration is claiming that an election is rigged, even before voters actually cast their ballots. Some far-right candidates utilized this tactic in the Irish local elections, but there was a fair amount of pushback to the rigging claims, with people not wanting to import “American nonsense over here.” Conversely, the American far-right has taken lessons from its European counterparts as well. For example, Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary provides a playbook on how to not only win in the present but also make it harder for the opposition to win in the future, and far-right populists in other countries are taking notes. Overall, this is really a transnational movement, fueled by social media, with multiple nodes and overlapping networks. This is part of the reason why so many political scientists have voiced concerns about the stability of liberal democracy in the West.
That said, the other thing to keep in mind heading into the U.S. presidential election is, despite an incredible amount of media attention, far-right anti-immigration candidates underperformed across Ireland. Ironically, there were over four times the number of immigrant-origin candidates elected to local office than anti-immigration candidates. More broadly, if we look back at European elections this summer, there has been significant voter pushback against the far right. France is perhaps the most notable example. After the far right did well in the first round of voting, left-wing and centrist parties formed a populist front to block the far right from actually winning seats. It will be interesting to see if American voters employ a similar strategy to block Donald Trump and aligned down-ballot candidates from winning in November.