The Immigration Debate

Those who oppose immigration | Enriching Ireland | Before and after the Famine | The American experience

Before and After the Famine.

We usually date mass migration of Irish people to the Famine years after 1845; pre-Famine emigrants are usually assumed to be the better-off, artisans, Protestants.

However, in the early 1840s, Thomas Carlyle and Friedrich Engels were already writing about the Irish arriving at a rate of 50,000 every year in cities like Manchester and Liverpool, workers whose willingness to live in filth ("little above the savage") was driving down the wages of the English. Engels was horrified at the fatal consequences of peasant standards of hygiene being imported to crowded slums. "And even if the Irish . . . should become more civilised, enough of the old habits would cling to them to have a strong degrading influence upon their English companions in toil."

Together with the ideology of a British state that needed to justify its colonial role in Ireland, this wage-competition from Irish workers and the dreadful poverty in which they lived (and died) sustained anti-Irish sentiments and stereotypes in Britain right through the 20th century. Even while the 1961 census showed 2 per cent of the people in England and Wales to have been born in Ireland's 26 counties, it was common at that time for landlords to stick up signs saying "No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs".

The American Experience

There were fewer such emigrants in America before the Famine. However, from the 1840s they arrived there, too, in a state that made Engels' observations in Manchester look like the height of glamour. Those whose survived the Atlantic crossing (stowaways often joined the packed passengers on "coffin ships") soon filled the cellars of many cities with their wretchedness. If it hadn¹t been for the charitable efforts in many communities of Irish Emigrant Societies, mostly run by earlier migrants, many more of them would have died.

The reception wasn't all charitable. Even without any specific gripe against Ireland, huge sections of American opinion were hostile to the immigrants. Although there was no legal restriction on immigration, an anti-immigrant political movement, the Know-Nothings, threw the US two-party system into turmoil in the 1850s. Under the influence of the Know-Nothings, the state of Massachusetts even deported "paupers": Mary Williams and her infant daughter Bridget were shipped back to Liverpool in 1855, begging and crying as she was forced on to the packet Daniel Webster.

This deportation brought an outcry from the Boston Daily Advertiser: "The offence of this poor woman, for which she was thus violently and ignominiously expelled from Massachusetts, was the fact that she was born in Ireland and a pauper."

During the US Civil War in the 1860s, some Northerners were inclined to contrast the lazy, drunken, violent Irishman with the intelligent, gentle and patriotic "Negro". And, contrary to the myth that Irish quickly became flag-waving Americans, their impression was confirmed when thousands of Irishman rioted in New York against an inequitable draft into the Union army; the Irish mob took their anger out on a "Coloured Orphanage", burning it to the ground.

The New York Draft Riots, in which hundreds died, were just one case. Most large US cities have some history of "Irish riots", often provoked by Know-Nothingism, in the mid-1800s. In St Louis, for example, an unwise Irishman made the mistake of verbally slagging a company of volunteer fireman fighting a Mississippi steamboat blaze: the ensuing melee saw the systematic destruction by an "American" mob of businesses called O'Brien's, Shannon's, Gilligan's, Murphy's and Brady's, then the demolition of a row of Irish boarding houses.

In the 1850s, criminal convictions among the Irish in New York were, proportionately, five times higher than among American or German-born.

The Irish did, eventually, give as good as they got. Long before the end of the 1800s, with the help of the Catholic church, they were well established in local politics and law enforcement (and in a connected sphere, organised crime). Eventually they broke through, too, into business and the professions, the military and national politics, becoming one of the best-off ethnic groups in the US.

In fact, their success took on mythic proportions back home. As late as 1984, Cardinal Tomas O Fiach could write of Irish-American power: "If this mighty power could be properly harnessed in support of the homeland - disciplined, united, irresistible - all our economic and political problems would be quickly solved." Perhaps the Irish-American role in the peace process has partly proved him right.

However, these developments came too late for most of the Famine and post-Famine emigrants themselves. Nearly all those who became entrepreneurs or even skilled workers in America had already been part of more urbanised and commercialised sections of Irish society. As for the rest, the majority, they displayed all the hallmarks of an underclass: the highest rates of transience, residential density and segregation, inadequate housing and sanitation, high levels of commitment to prisons and charity institutions - and, of course, a very high death rate.

And for these poor emigrants, even their children's social mobility was severely limited by the fact that they had to leave school to earn money from an early age.

As historian Kerby A Miller has written, the Irish "played an important role" in the development of America, but it "was ambiguous, turbulent, even tragic, and the Irish made no easy accommodation to the changing conditions that buffetted them". And while Irish political and public opinion has supported the claims of Irish emigrants in the US to be a special case, worthy of special consideration in that country's immigration law, history tells us different: the Irish were special only in as much as they were the first large group of the world¹s poor to arrive on America's eastern seaboard - and as such they've been living, working, suffering there a little longer. Otherwise, the resemblance to other "economic migrants" throughout the world is striking.

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