OPINION / Fintan O'Toole: It struck me last week, listening to people talking about the awful story of Denise Livingstone being turned away from Monaghan hospital and losing her baby after giving birth on the road to Cavan, how often the image of Mary and Joseph finding no room at the inn came up.
This may be a post-Christian society, but it is also one with a deep and abiding memory of the condition of being away from home and feeling scared, lonely and abandoned.
The fear of finding no room at the inn strikes something deep within us as we approach Christmas, but it is perhaps embedded in all cultures. We know so much about the savage history of our species, about the impulse to despise those who are different, that it is easy to forget the sacred duty to comfort the stranger in distress also goes back a long way. In one of the earliest books of the Bible, Leviticus, God lays down the law for Moses: "And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love himself as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt."
It is there in the great Greek plays. In Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonnus, Theseus, King of Athens, welcomes the blinded and exiled Oedipus: "Never could I turn away from any stranger / such as you are now / and leave him to his fate."
In Euripides's The Children of Heracles, the citizens vote to take in the exiled offspring of the fallen hero, even at the risk of their own safety. Generosity towards the stranger expresses the host city's sense of its own honour.
Of course there is also the other impulse, the fear of the stranger, the unease even decent people feel in the presence of people they do not immediately understand. Rudyard Kipling expressed it best: "The Stranger within my gate / He may be true or kind / But he does not talk my talk - / I cannot feel his mind / I see the face and eyes and mouth / But not the soul behind."
It would be nice to think that the generous impulse could of itself overcome the suspicious mind and encourage us to make room at the inn. But in these times that are so dominated by economic considerations, perhaps it is only a sense of self-interest that can bridge the gap between them.
Official Irish rhetoric about immigration and asylum (two separate but related issues) usually includes some passing reference to the benefits that migrants bring to us, and then goes on to concentrate on dangers, restrictions, fears. Michael McDowell's speech on immigration policy was a typical example, with a cupla focail about the good things and a long reflection on the need for control and vigilance.
There needs to be balance in immigration policy. But to get it, we need to talk, as our leaders almost never do, about the gains. The bad news takes care of itself, spread by wildly inflated rumours that harden into widely accepted "facts". The good news is scarcely audible.
Almost at the same time as Michael McDowell was speaking last week, the British Home Office was quietly releasing a series of studies on the economics of immigration in the UK. These independent reports reflect the reality of what has happened after 50 years of significant immigration in Britain, and as such give a good picture of where Ireland might be in 40 years' time. And they show what nonsense much of the received wisdom on the subject turns out to be.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, for example, that immigrants, because they are coming from low-wage economies, compete with natives for jobs and therefore drive down wages. In fact: "Immigration is found to have, if anything, a positive effect on the wages of the existing population - using the most robust data source which is available, an increase in immigration of 1 per cent of the non-migrant population leads to a nearly 2 per cent increase in non-migrant wages."
Far from driving down wages, immigrants who enter the workforce (and many are excluded by racism) "tend to earn more on average than the UK-born. Average gross weekly earnings among migrants is £403, compared to £338 among the UK-born (that is, about 19 per cent more). This is true, to a greater or lesser extent, at virtually all skill/qualification levels."
Likewise, the studies found that immigration does not have a measurable effect, either positive or negative, on unemployment among the native population: "If there is an impact of immigration on unemployment then it is statistically poorly determined and probably small in size."
Furthermore, as the studies note: "Migrants can indirectly generate economic activity elsewhere (through knock-on effects), create jobs by employing people, and also help to develop new sectors and new ideas, resulting in some restructuring of the economy." Selfish as our society now is, we probably need to be told these things if we are to take a more benign attitude to the newcomers in our midst. Simple human compassion, and the memory that we too have been "strangers in the land of Egypt" ought to urge us to make room at the inn. But it wouldn't hurt if our leaders reminded us that the strangers can also make the inn bigger for everyone.