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Today's St. Patrick's Day, a day when thoughts in the US— in the modern US— turn to supposedly very Irish things such as drinking whiskey and green beer and eating corned beef. Although I have Irish-American forebears and grew up celebrating St. Patrick's Day every year wearing green and visiting my (Irish-American) grandmother's house for a meal of corned beef and cabbage and potatoes, I'm not into that form of celebration anymore. I'm too pissed at how crass commercialism has reduced it all to stereotypes about drinking. Instead I've used St. Patrick's Day the past few years as a chance to take a moment and reflect on the experiences of Irish immigrants and their descendants in the US and what lessons we can learn from them.
The lesson I'm thinking about this year is immigration. Most of us in the US, not just those who trace ancestry back to Ireland, are descended from immigrants. But the Irish were one of the early groups that encountered a lot of politicized hatred. When waves of Irish started arriving in the 1840s and 1850s as refugees from the Great Potato Famine, politicians decried their lazy, uneducated, unclean ways, warning that they'd turn cities such as New York and Boston (where they arrived by ship) into cesspools of human sloth and waste. The language and sentiment behind it were eerily similar to what we hear from certain politicians in 2024.
But the Irish didn't destroy New York and Boston. Or Philadelphia. (Many Irish settled in eastern Pennsylvania, too.) Far from it. They went to work. They worked because they came here seeking better lives, via the opportunity to work. They worked hard jobs for low pay that other people didn't want to work. And the influx of their labor helped the US grow.
Many Americans— with no awareness of how they themselves were immigrants or had immigrant parents or grandparents— didn't even like the fact that Irish immigrants wanted to work. Up through the middle of the 20th century signs like "Irish need not apply" on businesses that were hiring were common sights.
The modern analogue to overt job discrimination against immigrants would seem to be immigration policy. Today immigrants who are granted temporary residency aren't allowed to work. Long ago, there weren't such policies. When Irish people started immigrating in large numbers there weren't even controls on immigration. They bought a ticket to New York, walked down the ramp into port, and began their new lives in the US. Ellis Island as an immigration station only opened in 1892. And while the first legislation that limited immigration from any country was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, it wasn't until the Immigration Act of 1924 that broad, per-country quotas on immigration (except northern European countries!) were enacted.
So, on this St. Patrick's Day, there are 3 lessons I wish everyone who celebrates Irish-American culture would recognize:
1) The hateful language against immigrants, including your forebears, has been the same for hundreds of years.
2) The claims the haters make about immigrants, including your forebears, harming this country have proven false generation after generation.
3) Immigration doesn't ruin the US, it makes it stronger.
The lesson I'm thinking about this year is immigration. Most of us in the US, not just those who trace ancestry back to Ireland, are descended from immigrants. But the Irish were one of the early groups that encountered a lot of politicized hatred. When waves of Irish started arriving in the 1840s and 1850s as refugees from the Great Potato Famine, politicians decried their lazy, uneducated, unclean ways, warning that they'd turn cities such as New York and Boston (where they arrived by ship) into cesspools of human sloth and waste. The language and sentiment behind it were eerily similar to what we hear from certain politicians in 2024.
But the Irish didn't destroy New York and Boston. Or Philadelphia. (Many Irish settled in eastern Pennsylvania, too.) Far from it. They went to work. They worked because they came here seeking better lives, via the opportunity to work. They worked hard jobs for low pay that other people didn't want to work. And the influx of their labor helped the US grow.
Many Americans— with no awareness of how they themselves were immigrants or had immigrant parents or grandparents— didn't even like the fact that Irish immigrants wanted to work. Up through the middle of the 20th century signs like "Irish need not apply" on businesses that were hiring were common sights.
The modern analogue to overt job discrimination against immigrants would seem to be immigration policy. Today immigrants who are granted temporary residency aren't allowed to work. Long ago, there weren't such policies. When Irish people started immigrating in large numbers there weren't even controls on immigration. They bought a ticket to New York, walked down the ramp into port, and began their new lives in the US. Ellis Island as an immigration station only opened in 1892. And while the first legislation that limited immigration from any country was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, it wasn't until the Immigration Act of 1924 that broad, per-country quotas on immigration (except northern European countries!) were enacted.
So, on this St. Patrick's Day, there are 3 lessons I wish everyone who celebrates Irish-American culture would recognize:
1) The hateful language against immigrants, including your forebears, has been the same for hundreds of years.
2) The claims the haters make about immigrants, including your forebears, harming this country have proven false generation after generation.
3) Immigration doesn't ruin the US, it makes it stronger.
