Pay your tax, work hard... but it’s not good enough for Irish in Trumpland
TWO years ago I went with a TV documentary crew to Yonkers in upstate New York, to meet Irish people afraid of being deported under the new president Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant administration.
Yonkers, for those who haven’t been there, is a city about the size of Cork, which, while described as being upstate New York is, in reality, just 32km from downtown Manhattan and bordering The Bronx.
It is an affordable place for many people to live while they work in New York and is a reasonably easy commute.
The Irish sections are remarkable. I went into Irish bars on McLean Avenue that were replicas of what we have in rural Ireland, except with more traditional Irish or country and Irish music playing. County flags were festooned everywhere and pints of Irish beer flowed. Some of the small shops were even selling Barry’s Tea and Tayto crisps. It was around St Patrick’s Day when I visited and there were as many Tricolours flying as there would have been back home.
Trouble
The place is full of first-generation Irish people, many of whom have not been home since they left ten, 15, 20 or even more years ago. Their reason for not risking a visit home is that they are not legally resident in the United States. They came in on tourist or holiday visas, allowing them to spend 90 days in the US if they didn’t work, but the reality is that most of them found work and, as was probably their initial intention, decided to stay longer. Questions they couldn’t answer would be asked if they should subsequently try to re-enter the country.
I met people who missed funerals of parents for that reason, who had never brought their children home to meet their grandparents, who missed weddings of brothers and sisters, who were fearful that any day agents from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could swoop, and arrest and then deport them. It meant that many of them were fearful of speaking to the camera for fear of identification, and that others were reluctant to do so because, while they were legal, their spouses weren’t.
And yet they hid in plain sight. They all had jobs and paid their taxes, had social security numbers, full driving licences obtained locally, sent their children to local schools and were part of their community.
They had taken out mortgages to buy homes. Most of them were confident their situation would not change, that a blind eye would continue to be turned by the authorities to their presence, as long as they didn’t get in trouble with the law.
But their fear, as they expressed it to me, was that things might change under the Trump administration. They knew that previous administrations had been tough on deporting illegal aliens (Clinton getting rid of as many as 12million in eight years, Bush a few million less and Obama about 5million), but quietly one or two conceded to the dirty little Irish secret: most of the Irish felt relatively safe because they were native English speakers and had white skin colour.
Other immigrants from different ethnicities would get run out before it happened to them.
But there is a danger that our luck could have run out.
Last week things changed for an Irishman, one who had set up a new life in Philadelphia, not Yonkers, one of the many sanctuary cities to which the Irish have flocked – a sanctuary city being a place where the local authorities will not arrest aliens over their status and provide little or no help to federal authorities who want to do so.
The plight of Keith Byrne, the Corkman facing deportation from the United States – where he is married to an American citizen with whom he has children, and who runs a business on which he pays taxes – because he is technically an illegal alien has captured the interest of many Irish people.
To many, it doesn’t seem fair that this man, living there 12 years, who had been trying to regularise his situation, is facing the most dramatic upheaval to his life. To others, it seems more than right that someone who is in the US under false pretences should be removed, like tens of millions of people have been before him.
I know nothing more about Byrne than I’ve read and heard and I have no idea what type of individual he is. But it is hard not to feel sympathy for the 37year-old’s plight.
His wife Keren has a child by another relationship, to whom he is stepfather, and that child, a teenager, cannot be easily relocated to Ireland.
Keren may have no real interest in living in Ireland, having no knowledge of the country. We must presume that Byrne has never been able to bring her here, as he would have run the risk of not being able to re-enter the US subsequently.
Even if she decides to follow him back, if he is deported, where would they live, and what would she and her husband work at? It is not automatic that an American citizen would be allowed to live in Ireland and, being a spouse of an Irish citizen does not confer automatic entitlements to work.
What would they do with the house they own in Pennsylvania? How would Ireland suit their three children?
Byrne entered the US on the 90-day visa, but when his time was up he stayed and worked.
It seems he may have made the mistake of applying for citizenship, instead of continuing to lie low. His problem is that he has a past record in Ireland, a couple of offences involving possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use.
It may seem like a trifling offence, but in Trumpland it could lead to his ejection.
Prejudice
Trump has weaponised immigration from the moment he launched his presidential campaign in 2015. He has wrongly suggested that immigrants are the cause of crime when the stats and facts show they are far less likely to be involved in criminal behaviour, for fear of deportation.
But he knew it was good for whipping up prejudice and fear among those who feel disenfranchised or who are simply racist.
He dubbed Mexicans as ‘rapists’ as he demanded they be stopped from entering the US. He has spoken of people from the Caribbean and Africa as coming from countries that are ‘s***holes’. Last weekend he attacked four congresswomen of colour – Alexandria OcasioCortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar – telling them to go back to their own countries if they didn’t like the US, despite the fact that the first three are all American born.
The fourth, Omar, has been a US citizen longer than the president’s third wife, Melania Krauss, who got her citizenship in 2006, at the age of 36, one year after she married Trump.
The ugliness of that behaviour has overshadowed his order that ICE carry out mass raids against those suspected of overstaying their visitor visas. Yesterday, Trump was unable to say how many such arrests had been made. The Obama administration had focused on those with criminal records or who had newly arrived, but Trump has ordered a more scattergun approach, which makes many Irish people nervous. There could be as many 50,000 illegal Irish (who we prefer to call undocumented) with their families who have so much to fear.
Their situations may not be as serious as those of the children sent to what are called detention centres (where the conditions are horrific), but it is deeply worrying all the same.
Who among us, who had tried our best even if we had set up home in somewhat shady circumstances, would want it all taken from us?