A HUNDRED and twenty years ago, in the rich cities, it was common for the natives to complain about the influx of immigrants. The incomers were dirty and desperate. They would take the menial jobs belonging to natives. They would use the sympathy evoked by their hardship to elbow their way to the table of societies wealthier than the ones they had come from.
In 1853, the great black American leader, Frederick Douglass, wrote that "every hour sees us elbowed out of some employment to make room for some newly arrived emigrant from the Emerald Isle, whose hunger and colour entitle him to special favour. These white men are becoming house servants, cooks, stewards, waiters, and flunkies. For aught I see they adjust themselves to their stations with all proper humility. If they cannot rise to the dignity of white men, they show that they can fall to the degradation of black men.
Though it may not be worth remembering for much else, this election campaign may have the disgraceful distinction of being remembered as the first in which race has been an issue. Certainly in Dublin, and to a lesser extent elsewhere, resentment against immigrants from Africa and Eastern Europe has been simmering under the surface of the media campaigns, but emerging directly on the doorsteps.
The number of asylum seekers reaching Ireland has undoubtedly risen: from 424 in 1995, to 1,179 in 1996, to 1,200 so far in 1997. We are, in other words, talking about at most 3,000 people in 2 1/2 years "swamping" a population of 3 1/2 million. We have, it appears, not managed to shake off the mentality summed up in Brian Lenihan's notorious remark that "we can't all live on a small island". Yet the fact is that the ESRI predicts the population of the Republic will, even in 2011, be only 3.89 million, leaving it as still one of the least densely populated countries in Europe.
Nevertheless, "I am not racist but has become the password to gain entry to phone in programmes and letters columns. A typical letter in the Evening Herald this week complained that `We are being swamped with foreign beggers (sic) on our streets and in our churches. No other country would tolerate this situation. We should restrict ourselves to taking only a limited number of genuine refugees."
Fianna Fail's Liam Lawlor seems to have been the first candidate to raise the issue in the election campaign, but he was not the last. In Cork South West, there is even a candidate standing purely on an "immigration control ticket". ("I value the level of homogeneity we had in this country .. . I don't want us to end up with cities like Bradford or Notting Hill . . . Political asylum is not a human right, it's a charity to be extended by a government ... Let's put Romania on a white list this week.")
However shameful the retailing of cliche's about immigrants is in any part of the world, it is doubly so in a country which has always assumed its citizens have the right to live anywhere.
Apart from one short period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, no generation growing up in Ireland from the mid 19th century to the mid 1990s has been confident of staying here.
Just eight years ago, we had net emigration of 44,000. We went through paraxysms of national outrage at the plight of illegal Irish economic migrants in America. We buttonholed every senator and congressman with an eye on the Irish vote and expressed our sense of betrayal at America's refusal to accept as many of our economic refugees as we chose to send her.
But give us just two or three years without much net emigration and what happens? We can barely restrain ourselves from putting up signs saying "No dogs, no Romanians".
Apart from the breathtaking hypocrisy of this attitude there is also the rather sickening sight of people who never gave a tuppeny damn for the homeless and the poor suddenly discovering them. The cry goes up that this influx of economic migrants is taking resources that rightly belong to our very own poor people.
It is indeed the ease that the under resourced system for dealing with refugees and migrants is forcing them into competition with homeless and destitute natives. It is true the strain on that system has led to chaos and tension. But the question that ought to arise is why there are so many natives living like refugees in their own country. Why are the systems for dealing with people in desperate circumstances so poorly built that a relatively small extra strain makes them collapse?
THE ESRI has pointed out that rates of pay for unskilled labour in Ireland have become so unattractive to people with social welfare entitlements we may end up looking to "immigration of people to fill vacancies". Immigration, if it happens on any significant scale over the next decade, will simply be a continuation of a phenomenon that has been at the heart of Irish life for 150 years - migrants moving in to take jobs that the natives have learned to turn up their noses at.
The fact that the migrants will be coming to, rather than leaving, Ireland will simply be a mark of the fact that we have arrived in the developed world. The fact that at the first sign that this might be about to happen we become so hysterical that we forget our own history is, however, a reason to wonder whether we are fit for it.
Fifty years ago, as the details of the Holocaust emerged, the Secretary of the Irish Department of Justice wrote in an internal memorandum published in Prof Dermot Keogh's Twentieth Century Ireland explaining why Ireland would not accept many Jewish refugees. "The immigration of Jews is generally discouraged . . . They do not assimilate with our own people but remain a sort of colony of a worldwide Jewish community. This makes them a potential irritant in the body politic and has led to disastrous results from time to time in other countries."
It might be no harm to put this statement up on the lampposts beside the election posters as a reminder that it is not immigrants who undermine a civilised society, but racists.