Conflict over US immigration policy isn’t new. It’s followed immigration waves of
Italians, of Polish, of Belgian Walloons, of Swedes and
Norwegians, and of even my people, the Germans. A few chapters into an excellent
biography (The Immortal Irishman), I was
reminded that Irish wave was opposed as well. Sure, I knew why and how
the Irish came to the United States in the mid 19th century, but
until I read Timothy Egan’s clear vivid prose, I had forgotten the horror and
desperation of that journey. Good writing puts life in perspective.
The Irish exodus began in 1845 after small Irish plots that
usually shone “gorgeous lilac-and-gold heralding of a healthy potato crop,”
turned “black-topped and broken… (There was) ruin and spoilage everywhere as if
someone had come through and sprayed acid over the green of Ireland’s living
pantry.” The potato, the humble, nutritious easy-to-grow plant was 90% of the
rural Irish diet. A small patch would feed a family for 10-months and have a
little left over for the pig.
The potato blight, carried over from the United States in the
hulls of trading ships and incubated in foggy and rainy conditions in 1845 and
1846, utterly wiped out all edible plants and all hope. The English, who were protectors
of the island, dismissed the early reports of the blight and famine as typical
Irish Blarney and did nothing. Too soon it was too late for help. Egan wrote. “Europe
had not seen a famine on this scale since the Dark Ages.” More than a million
Irish died.
Thomas Meagher (the subject of the biography), a noble son
of Irish elite in Waterford, came of age during the famine and spoke out against
English rule and for Irish nationalism. He and fellow revolutionaries were
captured and exiled to the prison island of Tasmania, the underside of
Australia. With his family’s help, Meagher escaped to New York. Once there, the
Irish, as did all people of the 1850s, asked themselves the Great Question:
slave or free? Some Irish joined the rebel cause and some, like Meagher, fought
for the union.
Meagher used his charisma and reputation as a Young Ireland
leader to recruit Irish to the 69th New York State Militia and a
unit called the Irish Zouaves. Fighting through the slaughter of Union defeats,
the Irish earned respect from both Union units and the South. Even the great
Robert E. Lee said he dreaded seeing “that damn Green Flag” of the Zouaves in
battle. The Irish, like many immigrants, fled certain starvation for the hope
of a new life, even when that new life brought its own prejudice and dangers. To
immigrate to the US during the Civil War, meant death and burial for too many
Irish recruited for the war.
Many years later, Egan noted that President John F.
Kennedy, paid tribute to his own ancestor, Patrick Kennedy, who left Ireland in
the worst year of the famine. “What was it,” Kennedy asked, "that got so many
families through centuries of subjugation, through starvation, through mass
eviction, through exile, through Know-Nothing persecutions, epics of tragedy
broken only by temporary periods of joy?” What got the Irish immigrant through “was the remarkable combination of hope, confidence
and imagination,” according to the President.
Today’s immigration debate misses the point of how we are
made safe because it misses how we are made strong. The sovereignty of the United States has never been its army or
navy, Homeland Security apparatus or the walls that we build along our borders.
Our strength is the confluence of major streams of migration that we welcome each day to
bring new life blood to the democratic traditions of our remarkable founding documents.
Sure there will be
those who want to hurt us. We need to be prudent but life has risks in new countries as well as old. Our strength is as a Wall Street Journal columnist noted last
week that we are not only the land of the free, but also the home of the brave. Thomas Meagher and our ancestors taught us that much.
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