Irish America’s tumultuous history and today’s heart-wrenching immigrant crisis

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If we seek to empathize with current immigrants from poorer countries and improve their experiences and living conditions, we can draw from Irish-American history in a variety of ways.

Looking at this history allows us to highlight the hypocrisy in a historical sense of Irish Americans who have anti-immigrant stances, and it also enhances our comprehension of the magnitude of the hardships immigrants from the Global South currently face.

As Irish Americans, our collective experience lends itself to comparison and contemplative reflection.

As the first immigrant group to come to the United States en masse, themes of xenophobia, poverty, tragedy and upward mobility provide us with many avenues to look at today’s immigrants.

But it is crucial that we do not over-simplify our own history and assume that the upward mobility of Irish-Americans was a standard or natural process.

Moreover, we must realize that this process will not be magically or effortlessly replicated for most of today’s immigrants, given the country’s current social, political, and economic landscapes.

Comparing our own immigrant backgrounds to today’s non-white immigrants can then become a quite useful exercise, as long as we do not equate or too closely blend the different experiences of different immigrant groups in different eras.

If we can avoid doing that, then we can not only begin to understand ourselves better, our own ethnic histories, and our nation’s history, but we enable ourselves to identify and more deeply understand the distinct challenges for today’s immigrants (and potential immigrants).

There is an ethnically Irish version of the “American Dream” narrative which enjoys large popularity amongst the Irish-American population, regardless of how far back one’s Irish ancestry goes.

It is not, by any means, uniformly accepted by everyone.