In Crossroads:
What we can learn from past immigrant waves
What we can learn from the experience of the Irish in America.
Ever wonder why you’re here? In America, I mean.
For many of us, it’s because some folks earlier on in our family line made a decision to leave where they were and come here in pursuit of liberty and improved life prospects for themselves and their descendants. It’s also because the U.S. government had put in place policies that enabled, even encouraged, immigration. (Or in the case of so many African-Americans, drove forced immigration and slavery.)
In my case, all four of my grandparents were Irish immigrants to this country in the early years of the 20th century. As Irish Catholics on small, unproductive farms, they were fleeing poverty, as well as religious and cultural bigotry enshrined in British rule of Ireland. The two I knew best were Nora and John Cunningham, from Castlebar in County Mayo, who lived blocks from where I grew up in New York City.
Were they a threat when they arrived? Plenty of Americans thought so. They came in the wake of the huge wave of immigrants from post-famine Ireland in the second half of the 19th century. This group of refugees was greeted with the infamous NO IRISH NEED APPLY employment notices.
White Anglo-Saxon Protestants feared losing jobs to the desperate newcomers, who were said to be loyal to the anti-democratic Roman Pope and his growing army of priest-agents in America, those practitioners of dark rituals that kept their ignorant charges in thrall. The Catholic Church even established a separate system of religious schools to wall off the children from the temptations of American Protestantism and secularism.
In my grandparents’ generation, the image of the Irish as drinkers, brawlers, living unassimilated, tribally, in Irish ghettos in the big cities and producing violent thugs and corrupt political machines became the stuff of lurid Hollywood legend. Irish gangsters were domestic terrorists, killing their fellow Americans for psychopathic fun and organized crime profit. As with all stereotypes, these had some factual basis. Tammany Hall to Whitey Bulger and their like is the sordid, bloody backstory of the Irish in America.
And then there’s the much larger, more telling and significant front story of Irish America. That’s the one about the Irish immigrants and their descendants
who served and still serve in huge numbers in America’s wars — from the Civil War on. It’s the story of so many men and women of Irish descent who have worked hard to build the institutions of democratic government, education and the free market here; have helped to make them function effectively and fairly, and have put themselves in harm’s way to defend them as police officers.
Is my Irish tribe better than other large immigrant cadres of their time? Better than the Italians, the Germans, the European Jews and others? No, my point is precisely that they are not.
All were thought to pose threats to the fabric of American society. All did, in their own way. But the vast majority turned out to be ardent patriots in the country that had extended a lifeline to them.
America always has been a nation that defines itself by its embrace of the new, by its sense that its very essence is its ability to redefine itself for the future through regular infusions of new citizens. The new blood, new energy, new ideas they bring have been the marrow of America’s distinct liveliness among the nations of the world, its animating genius.
Are Muslim immigrants more likely to pose a serious threat to America than Irish immigrants were thought to in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th? Not if you asked the American nativists of those days. To them, the Irish then seemed as “other” as Muslims do to some Americans now.
We should not be afraid to accept the risks of immigration in order to hold to our ideals and achieve our goals. We’re Americans, dammit, not a bunch of cowering, closed-in, backward-looking scaredy-cats. Vet the current immigrants with the best vetting we can manage, which will never be perfect. At the same time, send a clear message around the world that America wants its “goers,” those who will risk all they have for a better life for themselves and their offspring in a land of freedom.
My grandparents were among those goers. So here’s a prayer for Nora and John at a time of the testing of the spirit in the country they came to love so well. Help us fight off our fears. Help us, to paraphrase Lincoln, embrace the better, braver angels of our nature. Fortify the temper of the nation you, initially foreigners, helped to make great, so that we can continue to make it great again and again and again by attracting people like you to its shores.