The Irish Immigration Problem?

In the United States, people are screaming about our illegal immigration problem. Being in Ireland last week, it was interesting to see the immigration problems being faced by Ireland. Unlike the United States, Ireland is losing native population to other countries and need immigrants to deal with an acute labour shortage. I was in one grocery store the other night in Dublin, and the only person that spoke English was the manager. I was curious what was driving so many Poles (100,000 I heard from one person) and Czechs (5,000 from the same person) to Ireland.

The story told by the young man driving us back to our hotel from Enterprise Car Rental offered one simple reason. He is in his young 20's and has a wife and two young children (4 and 1) back in the Czech Republic . He left the Czech republic, leaving them behind, to come to Ireland for two years to learn to speak, read and write English. Back home, he could only earn 80-90 Euros a month without knowing English. By learning the language, he could earn 2,000 Euros a month. You could hear the sadness in his voice and the longing for home as he told his story to SWMBO. But he knows that this is what he has to do to support his family in the long run.

When the Berlin wall fell, the floodgates from Eastern Europe opened. Meanwhile, the culture of Western Europe is, and will continue to change as the demographics are drastically changing. That is one of the reasons I took my family with me to Ireland, because who knows what the country will be like even ten years from now.