Ireland's New Face.(immigration changes Irish economy)

Just around the corner from the Christmasy store windows on Henry Street, famed as one of Europe's ritziest shopping areas, there's a stretch of Moore Street that Dubliners call Little Africa. It could just as well be called Little Shanghai or Little Riga. Alongside native Irish street vendors hawking fruits and vegetables, there is now a Russian delicatessen, an Afro-Caribbean Superstore and the Talk Is Cheap International Call Shop, where a bulletin board advertises jobs and rooms-to-let to the fast-growing Chinese community.

Forget those sepia-tone images of Dublin. The prewar city of James Joyce is, of course, long gone. Even the mid-'90s seems a distant memory on Moore Street. Dublin today is the base of an immigration surge that is transforming Ireland at a rate un-paralleled in speed and scale anywhere in Europe. And that has made the Emerald Isle a test case for how Europe will deal with one of its greatest dilemmas--the need for, and discomfort with, immigrant labor.

Ireland was until recently a nation of emigrants--and one of the most homogenous states in the European Union. As late as the 1980s, with the economy sagging, one sixth of the republic's population emigrated, peaking in a 12-month period in 1988-1989, when 70,600 Irish, or 2 percent of the population, went abroad. Today the trend has reversed. The country of 4 million people is absorbing nearly 50,000 immigrants a year. Per capita, that's four times the immigration rate in what we think of as the world's greatest melting pot, the United States. One example: in 1997 one Dublin secondary school took in its first non- Irish student ever, a boy from Angola; today 25 percent of the student body is foreign-born. Says Piaras MacEinri, one of Ireland's foremost immigration experts, "Ireland is changing so fast that it's hard for the country to catch its breath."

Perhaps that's precisely what the country needs, for most Irish are conflicted about immigration. Ireland needs workers. Like the rest of Europe, it is in a demographic bind, with fewer and fewer young people supporting more and more old folks. Unemployment has been at historic lows in recent years, so there's very little elasticity in the labor market. This adds up to ample opportunities for immigrants prepared to do manual labor and menial jobs--slots that newly prosperous native Irish --"job snobs" no longer want. It also translates into a lot of jobs in special categories--like medical practitioners and construction engineers--that aren't being filled by the native population.

But the reshaping of the job market, and the rapid cultural transformation that has come with it, has caused resentment among natives. As he meandered along Moore Street, Leo Behan, an elderly man from the working-class northern Dublin suburb of Finglas, griped that too many migrants were coming to Ireland and, in some cases, causing trouble. "The right people--no objections whatsoever," he says. "But the others, they are harassing so many people--crime and prostitution and drugs and all that." In this climate of fear and uncertainty, there have been some incidents of racism against immigrants. "Sometimes you can be walking the streets and they will say, 'You nigger, why do you come here?' " says Said Mahmod, an unemployed 41-year-old who fled war- torn Somalia five years ago.

Though the Irish have vast experience with labor migration--their own-- they remain unaccustomed to the diversity that immigration has brought to their country. "If you define yourself as an immigrant nation, you behave differently," says MacEinri. Unlike other countries that ...