Six out of ten new jobs filled by foreign nationals- but what happens now as employment slows?
http://irishtimes.com/your-money/2026/05/21/what-migration-data-tells-us-about-the-jobs-market/
Posted by andubhadh
Six out of ten new jobs filled by foreign nationals- but what happens now as employment slows?
http://irishtimes.com/your-money/2026/05/21/what-migration-data-tells-us-about-the-jobs-market/
Posted by andubhadh
21 Comments
Don’t be shy, what’s your take on it, OP?
A lot of them will move on, one imagines.
Sensationalist headline. A lot of the time jobs are filled by foreign nationals because there’s no one within the country with the skills needed to do the job (industries like medical, accounting and finance, business executives,etc) or they’re in jobs that Irish people don’t want to do (fruit picking, night shifts in warehouse).
How can you have “Other” as the second biggest categorisation of Employees by nationality, without even attempting to explain the breakdown in the article?
They’ll keep those jobs because plenty of Irish would rather sit on the dole then take that work.
Fact is they take jobs Irish people don’t want.
They also replace jobs that Irish can get better pay elsewhere in like the medical field.
What effect does this have on wage growth? Can someone with an economics background tell me
In the past five years, over 165,000 Irish citizens emigrated from Ireland. According to the Central Statistics Office (CSO).
The last time I needed to go to hospital I reckon a solid 50% of the staff were of foreign origin. Many of the nurses were foreign, the lady working at the information counter was foreign, and even my consultant was foreign.
Foreign workers are absolutely essential to the Irish economy because there are many jobs and industries in which Irish people either can’t work, or don’t want to work, and so it’s foreign nationals that do a lot of it.
To answer the headline: What will happen now is, employers will continue to use these foreign nationals as cheap labour, and it will become even more difficult for an Irish person to get even a menial or entry-level job.
We’re part of the largest free movement labour market in the world so you would expect this to be pretty high.
However workers from the other EU countries don’t see Ireland as that attractive anymore (we all know why) and in normal circumstances this would mean employers would have to do more to attract and keep workers. Instead we’ve opened the door to non-EU labour which has the effect of wage suppression.
It’s pure wage suppression
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These people pay taxes and consume less services than Irish people.
It’s not exactly a bad deal.
Old people want their asset prices to sky rocket and their services for next to nothing. This is the best way to do it.
This seems like the sort of thing you’d expect from a country with a sub-5% unemployment rate. Every foreign national coming to the country needs a job. We only have about 141k unemployed people in the country, about 100k if you count out the long-term unemployed. So it makes sense that new arrivals in the country would make up a significant share of new jobs.
simply less people will come some will leave.
we already saw this in 2008, the eastern Europeans started going home or moving elsewhere unless they’d roots put down here
How much is EU and Non-EU? How many workers of Non-EU origin are on student and graduate visas? They are mostly temporary, unless they are skilled and lucky enough to get sponsorship.
I’ve worked in business and many of my peers wouldn’t hire Irish people, they liked foreign nationals because they were easy to control.
A lot of the universities here make a fortune from foreign nationals and many of the so called english schools are really job mills for cheap cleaners.
Business people here have adopted the US system where they hire Mexicans for labour and foreign students in Universities.
That is an insane stat
You gotta love the casual racism against Irish in these type of posts that seems to be allowed just cause.
As someone who has worked in tech for a long time the patterns emerging in the past 5 years are obvious to see. Normally on a team of 10 I will be the only Irish person.