Creating a self-sustaining innovation ecosystem in Ireland relies on people: people to build innovative technologies, processes and businesses; people to fund such innovation; and people to conduct this complex orchestra.

In my last column, I talked about the difficulty of creating the extraordinary, one-in-a-hundred-million people that produce 99 per cent of the innovation that society needs. In short, if Ireland’s education system is optimised to output mediocrity, we cannot be surprised when this innovation ecosystem does not magically self-form to disrupt the global GDP as Silicon Valley did.

There are, however, many ways to skin a cat. It takes at least a generation to change and see the impacts of an entire education system. So if Ireland wants to create a production ecosystem before that, this will require some out-of-the-box thinking.

Luckily, there is a low-hanging fruit that could solve a significant amount of Ireland’s problems here: immigration.

Migration and Irish civilisation go hand in hand. I could write long chapters of romantic prose on those who left Ireland to make a life for themselves elsewhere, whether out of desire or desperation, but I wouldn’t embarrass myself by even trying.

Ireland is easily the world’s leading exporter of talent and culture. Demonstrating this point, there is virtually nowhere in the world that does not have an Irish pub. Further demonstrating this, there is virtually nowhere in the world I have gone where I haven’t sought the comfort of a local Irish embassy (er, I mean pub). 

Hundreds of years of emigration have turned Irishness into global brand recognition.

When I studied at the International Space University, driven by my whiskey habit at the time, The Dubliner pub in Strasbourg was the nightly place of choice for what I can only describe as debauchery amongst 100-plus international, space-obsessed colleagues. When some of us ended up in Washington DC, we repeated this nightly process in The Dubliner pub there. When I ended up in the middle of nowhere in Guatemala, pre-internet days, with all of my possessions stolen and a suitcase that never arrived, I spent several days living, eating and drinking at Reilly’s Pub with my sister (much to the amusement of its non-Irish owner).

When I moved to Boston with a truckload of belongings and needed several hands to help, I popped into my local The Druid and within ten minutes the bar staff were helping me move. I have hundreds of such stories; of being in an Irish pub in peculiar places and, despite an onslaught of undesirable outcomes usually driven by something I had done, things always turned out OK.

To my knowledge, there is no other culture that has this global diaspora network to tap into in this way. Generation upon generation of people leaving Ireland have created a flywheel enabling Irish people to feel at home anywhere in the world. Hundreds of years of emigration have turned Irishness into global brand recognition, and the Irish passport is one of the most valuable in the world. With it, there is nowhere that you won’t be welcomed with open arms and people to help you. Despite the Irish economy having regained its strength after the global financial crisis, Irish people continue to move to Australia, Canada and the US. The migration story continues.

Making it abroad

Let’s look very briefly at some of the people I know that are first- or second-generation Irish in the US that I can list offhand, without thinking too much. Founders of Stripe, Patrick and John Collison (damn, we should have tried to keep them). Leader of the Free World, Joseph R. Biden (ok, he is definitely not second-generation). Walmart and Slack board member Sarah Friar. Chief legal counsel at Walmart, Nuala O’Connor. Zoom’s global chief information officer Harry Moseley. Founder of Ginkgo Bioworks, the $5 billion biotech start-up, Barry Canton. Founder of Harvard’s Biodesign Laboratory, Conor Walsh. Nasa’s chief economist, Alexander MacDonald. Head of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Jonathan McDowell.

These names were top of mind. If I actually spent time thinking about it, this list would be way more extensive and way more impressive. As well as being a top exporter of culture, Ireland exports a hell of a lot of intellectual talent, too. And that is something to be extremely proud of! 

But when we think about creating our own ecosystem, we start thinking that perhaps, just perhaps, it would have been cool if the Collisons had stayed in Ireland. Or if Barry Canton had IPO’d Ginkgo on an equities exchange closer to Dublin. Many debates have been started by asking “Could Stripe have been created in Ireland” (the answer is always no, by the way). Regardless of how it is started, this conversation always ends with “how do we end the brain drain?”.

However, preventing people from leaving Ireland is only one half of the equation. What we don’t discuss nearly enough is how we get new people to come here. Just as Patrick Collison went to the US from Ireland, could Patrick 2.0 come to Ireland from elsewhere? The low-hanging fruit to fill the gaps of our innovation ecosystem clearly lies with immigration.

If Ireland’s history has been defined thus far through emigration, perhaps it’s time to consider that Ireland’s future will be defined by immigration.

Let’s look West towards the US, which recently passed the CHIPS and Science Act, which will spend $50 billion to onshore the semiconductor supply chain. While this massive investment is much needed and about fifteen years too late, there’s one small problem: Whether it was a $10 billion or $1 trillion investment, the bottleneck to creating a semiconductor industry in the US is not money but talent. People. Immigration.

As many founders know, if you get the right talent in at the beginning, you can save yourself years of development time and hundreds of millions of dollars of fundraising. In fact, bringing in the right talent is pretty much the only way that a small start-up can beat a multi-billion dollar incumbent. The same is absolutely true of an economy.

Ireland of the welcomes

There are two reasons why, in Ireland, we don’t think about immigration as much as we should. First, because it just doesn’t impact us. Most of the people we live and work with are European and have free movement.

Secondly, because of cultural reasons already discussed, we don’t think about people coming into Ireland, but instead of people leaving Ireland. Of course, my overwhelming bias here is that I am assuming that, because I do not think about immigration into Ireland, nobody else does either. Whilst it is definitely true that there are many people working on immigration policies, anecdotally this is just a topic that rarely (if ever) arises amongst my Irish friends and collaborators.

So, as discussed in my last article, we are not going to be able to prevent the talented people from leaving Ireland, and nor should we. But could Ireland create the innovation ecosystem it needs by enabling people to come here as quickly and easily as possible? I believe so, yes. Could Ireland begin to compete with the US and Israel if it could import talent? Again, I don’t think it’s impossible. If this is really the case, then what would we need to do to realise these outcomes?

While I often point out the things that Ireland does badly, immigration is one of the many things that Ireland does pretty well. Of course, those who have been through it generally loathe it, but compared to any other system it actually works quite well. Culturally, I’d like to think that we are progressive and liberal enough to actually want and enjoy having immigrants.

There are of course exceptions: At Harvard, an African friend and colleague told me that he had just spent a year living in a small town outside of Donegal town. This was particularly surprising to me since he was 6’3”, Black and had dreadlocks down to his waist. “They called me Thon Black Fella.” I cringed, but he luckily saw it as a local term of endearment. More recently, my sister and her brown-skinned Sri Lankan-Australian boyfriend were enjoying a pint in a pub on a backroad in Kerry for a whole ten minutes before the publican asked her partner if he was the new doctor in town. She was mortified; he thought it was a joke that he still doesn’t get.

Apart from the casual racism-cum-endearment, I have not come across immigration parading as a wedge issue in Ireland as it is in the US and UK. Surely then we should be exploiting this political goodwill and leaning into it as heavily as possible. Can’t go to New York, San Francisco or London? Limerick might be the place for you! I am only half-joking here. It really might be. I recently bought an art deco antique table from a Greek woman at MIT who was moving to Limerick with her postdoctoral boyfriend because US immigration was such a pain in the backside. We should be doing this at scale!

Some 40 per cent of graduate students at MIT (again: forty per cent) are foreign to the US. We should have a digger that literally scoops these PhDs up at their graduation ceremony, gets them drunk and by the time they sober up, they might be happy that they’re in Ireland enjoying themselves at Trinity or UL instead of fighting the US Center for Immigration Services for years on end.

In theory, this plan sounds like it might make sense, but the reality of how our immigration actually works today for the people we should want the most is in stark contrast to how it should work. This article is a direct response to the hours of thinking and many questions I’ve had since reading this tweet, which went viral recently. 

As I read the tweet thread, which I urge you to do, I reflected on the fact that Ireland’s competitive advantage over nearly every other economy is that we are an island of céad míle fáilte, one hundred thousand welcomes. But this is not how our immigration process currently works. Our immigration system is failing us, the Irish people, much more than them, the immigrants, but not being as humane as our culture permits in every other form. I don’t believe there’s a single humane immigration system in the world, and I don’t see why Ireland couldn’t be the first.

Anjan’s tweets mostly pertained to the complexity of the Irish Residence Permit (IRP), but you don’t need to be an immigration expert to know that where the IRP poses unresolvable complexities, you can bet your bottom dollar that other visa processes in Ireland do too. It is probably easy to think of Anjan as a statistic, a single person out of thousands, who wants to live in Ireland, and should therefore shut up and stop complaining about the process if he wants residency so badly. But here’s the catch – what if we need Anjan more than Anjan needs us?

Anjan is doing a PhD in genomics and a ton of words that probably don’t mean much to most people except for: really fucking smart. When I looked up what he was researching at UCD in collaboration with the Science Foundation Ireland, there were even more words that I regularly hear in the corridors at MIT and the Broad Institute: CRISPR; phylogenetic analysis and so on.

Considering the following, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Anjan is begging the Irish government to give him permanent residency so that he can stay in Ireland instead of going to work for a fancy Professor at MIT who would pay him ten times as much, and the Irish government is saying “Mmmmmaybe. Dunno.”

The inhumanity of the immigration process extends well beyond having to wait around for a government clerk to stamp APPROVED on a piece of paper. It is hard to overstate how difficult the process is, and how much it disrupts your life, in every single way imaginable. Most of my twenties were tied up with a US immigration process that I can honestly say nearly killed me. 

A personal journey

For five years straight, I did nothing but work on my permanent residency (green card) status. All day and all night. For visa reasons I couldn’t take the jobs that I wanted or deserved, which was annoying but not even nearly the worst part of the process. In fact, most of the time I couldn’t work at all. Which was lucky because I didn’t have the time with my immigration paperwork!

The process cost me five years of my life, hundreds of thousands of dollars and an emotional price that is immeasurable. It destroyed my relationship with my partner, with my family and with my friends. I missed Christmases, birthdays, weddings, funerals, christenings. I was happy when the families of American friends adopted me when I was alone for holidays, but oftentimes it just seemed to highlight the loneliness of the process even more. 

If you’ve ever seen the movie The Terminal, this was my life.

I spent most of my late twenties lobbying politicians to help me in one of the most complex immigration cases that could have existed. At one point, I had a team of twelve (yes, twelve) lawyers working around the clock on a legal case against the US Government which had illegally rendered me stateless overnight and overseas. If you’ve ever seen the movie The Terminal, this was my life.

For several months, I was a resident of neither the UK, Ireland or the US. I was homeless, and sleeping on a friend’s sofa with no belongings, trying to get refugee status so that I could go home to where I had built my life: the United States. As my lawyer told me, “if you don’t hear back in two years, you have probably lost the case”. If I lost the case, I would never be allowed to re-enter the US. It was devastating.

I cried the day I received humanitarian assistance from the US, and I cried the day I received my green card. Not tears of joy, but tears of anger. Not every immigration story goes like this, but far too many do. I am angry, too, that Anjan is going through something similar in Ireland, although at least he is not battling Trump. And reading his tweets, I know all too well how he feels – his life is in perpetual turmoil. Even if you can’t empathise with the process, we should all be angry at the thought of potentially losing such talent because we either won’t take him in as quickly as possible, or that he will eventually become as worn down as I did and realise that it’s simply not worth it.

I’ve already said that companies can throw money at a problem, or just hire good people. The Irish economy should be using all of the global goodwill that Ireland has built over the last several generations of cultural exports to import the best people in the world to work here, and by making it as easy as possible to do this. Can you imagine if we told every tenth visitor to an Irish pub that they had to wait outside for four hours before entering? For paper shuffling reasons?  Not only would the visitors leave without spending their money in our economy, but they would never come back and tell their friends and family to do the same. This is exactly what we are doing to our economy albeit in a slightly different way.

All is not lost, however, as this is actually an easily solvable problem. Unlike immigration, gun control or other wedge issues in places that are eating up top talent, this is not a complex issue requiring two sides to negotiate along intractable lines. We could easily steal global talent market share by making the process more humane. This is merely a problem of process, not philosophy in Ireland.

Immigration procedures have the sneaking ability to quickly destroy a person’s life, and the lives of those people around them. By having a seamless immigration process for the people which Ireland needs more than they need Ireland, we’ll have created what famous innovation hubs used to, but no longer have: a pipeline of immigrants who start multi-billion dollar companies that change the world.

Kati Kariko, a Hungarian immigrant to the US, spent several years petitioning for residency and on multiple occasions nearly did not succeed. Despite these challenges, she went on to create the foundations for mRNA vaccines and is part of the reason millions of people all over the world are still alive today. More than anything, I hope in ten years’ time I don’t read that Anjan’s genomics work has created the breakthrough he’s been working on in cancer research at MIT’s Broad Institute instead of UCD, where it sounds like he very much wants to stay.

There is a real opportunity to leapfrog decades of stagnant innovation growth and to kickstart an ecosystem that is currently deprived of top global talent, nearly overnight. While Ireland figures out how to grow and retain its own one-in-a-hundred-million entrepreneurs, we should at least more seriously be considering how to import them en masse.