Undocumented Irish in America
Paddy’s Day was celebrated across the world yesterday, so it must be time for lobbyists campaigning for undocumented Irish to shout about how these people are being forgotten by American authorities, right? Yep.
I’m sick of hearing about how young Irish people are being ignored in United States by authorities. I’m sick of hearing how they miss their families. Go home, so. Seriously. If this happened in Ireland, these people would be shipped out if they had no entitlement to stay. Calling people who flout immigration law as ‘undocumented’ is a cop-out. It’s way of softening the issue. A PR exercise. Undocumented means illegal. Illegal. There are knowingly breaking immigration law in the country of arrival. They are illegal aliens and should be shipped out.
Why should it be any different for these ‘undocumented’ in America than for you and I? If someone goes to America and decides to down roots knowing that they have no legal status to stay there past a standard holiday visa, is that contrary to immigration law? Yes. But then there are the cries for compassion. Cries for the US administration to be fair. The ‘undocumented’ have families, communities, relationships. Yes, but they are breaking the law. Tough.
But more than all of this, what I have a problem with is the automatic expectation that Irish people have to obtaining the entitlement for residency just because US visas were common in Ireland of the 1980’s. Ireland was a different place back then. It was the unemployment blackhole of Western Europe. So what, just because of a shared generational gene-pool, we try to claim a preferential slice of the visa pie. It doesn’t sound very equitable, now does it? Is that fair?
March 18th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Brilliant post, telling it as it is.
March 19th, 2008 at 8:21 am
Thanks
March 20th, 2008 at 10:23 am
Aloha Alexia, great post. While I agree with you on most points, the fact is that Irish (and other) illegal immigrants are really pawns in the game that our governments play. Back in the early 1990s TWO different candidates for attorney general of the US (the highest law enforcement office in the country) were shot down because people dug around and found out that they had illegal aliens in their employ. The US as we know it, for better or worse, was built on the backs of immigrants, both legal and illegal, my Irish ancestors among them (though I don’t know which variety they were. Hope they were legal but at this point who cares). If every illegal immigrant in the US packed up and went home the country would probably come to a screaming halt.
If Ireland was sitting on huge oil reserves Bush would probably not only grant amnesty to every Irish illegal in the country, but send yachts for the rest that wanted to come over.
I don’t think that the illegal Irish in the country should be given any preference of illegal immigrants from other parts of the world, but I think our government does need to realize that most are here to stay, and come up with a workable means of getting them legally integrated into society.
March 20th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Great comment, Keola. Lots of sense. But I don’t believe that illegal immigrants are absolute pawns to fate. There’s a myriad of jobs they take up while in the US. They stay in America as their income their far exceeds anything they could make at home in the same profession. Hardly the work of pawns.
As regards their legal status, then perhaps they could be described as pawns. But aren’t we all pawns to the interests of administrations?
March 20th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Absolutely
April 30th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
What your saying is wrong…
Theres loads of Irish in the US, half the yanks say there half-Irish, so whats your problem??
May 1st, 2008 at 7:52 am
@Simon: What exactly do you find wrong here, Simon? Yanks who say they are Irish, well that’s a non-issue.
What’s that got to do with the topic? They have legal status to live in the US by virtue of their place of birth. Non-issue.
July 27th, 2008 at 11:53 am
All of these people are hard working, they pay their taxes, pay medical insurance (with the risk of being refused because of their status when they actually need it yet insurance companies happily take the premiums) and they make a valuable contribution, economically and socially, in the USA. They are not looking for an amnesty, they simply want a work-based system to have their position legalised and live without the daily fear of deportation. Some of them actually had their work visas from the 80’s and 90’s and started to down roots only to be refused on re-application.