Perhaps we should be more careful about how we bandy about words like "racism". Careless designation of people as racist only serves to increase the numbers of those who really deserve this epithet. There are genuine fears regarding the increased numbers of asylum-seekers, refugees and economic migrants.
Neither dismissing these fears, as some politically correct commentators do, nor pandering to them, as the Cork Fianna Fáil TD Noel O'Flynn has, serves any useful purpose.
The face of Ireland is changing. Change is always threatening. We need to provide a forum for people where their worries are taken seriously. Many Irish people have lived abroad and have seen societies which are marred by racial tensions.
I remember getting a taxi up to the mountains outside Lyons with a friend from the former Zaire. I had to endure a finger-wagging lecture from the taxi-driver for 20 minutes after my friend got out about the dangers of interracial relationships. It was either that or walk.
I remember thinking smugly at the time that you would never be lectured like that in Ireland. Boy, was I wrong.
People who have seen the destructive effect of racial tensions at first hand, in Britain or elsewhere, worry that such tensions will become part of Irish society. They are right to worry, because racial harmony does not just happen. It takes work, dialogue and honest expression of difficulties.
As John Dardis SJ of the Jesuit Refugee Service puts it, this debate is long on opinion and short on facts. And sometimes the facts are more reassuring than we might expect.
For example, while moaning about those who abuse the asylum-seeking process, Ireland has been very slow to put a proper migration channel into place, with work permits which would allow people to come here legitimately. One of the fears is that such immigrants would cause Irish people to be unemployed. An interesting book by Peter Stalker, Workers Without Frontiers - the Impact of Globalisation on International Migration, suggests that this is unlikely to be the case.
An OECD study has compared immigration flows and unemployment between 1984-1989 and 1990-1999 across a range of countries.The results suggest that there is no direct correlation between the growth in entries of foreigners in a country and changes in the unemployment rate. Other studies on individual countries have shown some negative effect on wages for blue-collar workers, but the overall effects are slight. This is also true in periods of recession.
This is not as surprising as it may seem. Immigrants are consumers who create demands for goods and services. That can have a positive effect on job-creation. Some studies indicate that immigrants do not reduce opportunities for national workers and in some cases may have improved them, by moving national workers up the hierarchy.
Just like the Irish in the US and Australia, immigrants are often very willing to work hard in jobs nationals consider demeaning, in order to accumulate what they need to go home successfully. We may well be cutting ourselves off from a source of energy and entrepreneurial spirit by refusing to allow immigrants and asylum-seekers to work.
The other facet of this debate which we do not look at very often is that many people who come here have a strong desire to return home, and we could facilitate that.
For example, a migration work channel could have some element of training, of equipping people to go home again. We are so focused on the wonders of our Celtic Tiger economy, even if it is not yowling so loudly at the moment, that we forget that it takes a great deal to force people to leave their own country.
They come here because they are experiencing persecution or poverty. They are often desperately homesick. That is part of the mourning for those few who are granted refugee status. It may mark the day when they realise that they will be unable to go home again, ever.
For those who will wish to remain, we need research into what works best in serving to integrate newcomers. Where are there examples of best practice internationally?
As even the formerly tolerant Denmark now has a party in government which was elected partly on a policy of cracking down on immigration, good examples may seem hard to come by. But they do exist, and they should be examined. Here in Ireland we have many instances of communities which have responded well to asylum-seekers. A little more focus on such stories would not hurt.
The British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, received much criticism for his suggestion that minority ethnic communities should improve their English and take a linguistic and cultural citizenship test when applying for UK citizenship. The criticism was particularly appropriate given that the riots which prompted these comments were among English speaking British Asians born in the UK. However, his clumsy comments do raise interesting questions for us here.
What is non-negotiable about Irish identity? How far should people be expected to integrate? Should our model be the melting pot, or multiculturalism, or sub-cultures? The benign view is that a great deal of integration takes place when the second generation goes to school and acquires an Irish accent.
However, deep unrest among people of Arab descent in France should warn us that it is not so simple.
We need research to find answers and we need it soon. The simple fact is that globalisation has spawned migration on a previously undreamt-of scale. The tender mercies of the IMF and World Bank have caused greater movement from disrupted economies. War and natural disasters have dislocated others.
We cannot expect to remain isolated. The question is no longer should we allow people in, but how do we deal with the reality of inward migration.