“Where Ya From?”
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! And some happy memories…
On a trip through Ireland back in 1979, a couple of college friends and I chanced upon a small convenience store run by a cheerful woman.
“Where ya from?” she asked.
“America.”
“Ah, America. A nation of mongrels!”
We chuckled at her joke, despite the implicit criticism of our country. We took pride in America’s marvelous melting pot; being a “mongrel” was a badge of honor, a result and reflection of our immigrant nation’s openness to the world.
In contrast, Ireland’s ethnic purity seemed surpassed only by its charming joviality and verdancy, and by its less enchanting and persistent rain, economic stagnation and cultural conservatism.
Returning in 2018 with my wife, the joviality clearly remained, from the convenience stores to the streets to (naturally) the pubs.
The friendliness included that of a guard outside the building housing the Taoiseach’s (Prime Minister’s) office. We queried him about how to pronounce that Gaelic word. (It’s “tea-shucks.”)
The query spurred digressions from one topic to another to another. Blessed with a gift of gab, so to speak, the guard regaled our group with an hour of insights on everything from why the Irish drive on the left to the history of the country’s Great Famine – both rooted in English rule that ended almost a century ago.
Ask the Irish a question and you’ll get a story…maybe many.
A New Story
That enduring and endearing joviality aside, so much else in Ireland’s national story has changed. In 2018, the predominantly Catholic country passed by a two-to-one margin a referendum legalizing abortion. From 2017 to 2020, its Taoiseach was the 30-something son of an Indian immigrant. He’s openly gay, and proudly displayed a Harvey Milk U.S. postal commemoration on the wall of his office.
Same-sex marriage was also legalized by referendum, in 2015. A gay pride parade in Dublin while we were there – doubling to 60,000 the previous year’s participation and including top military officials as marchers – seemed to celebrate not just LGBTI communities but diversity in general.
Ireland’s integration with the European Union and the rest of world means foreigners increasingly dot its demographics. The percentage of ethnic and racial minorities doubled to 12 percent early in the 21st century. With pre-Covid economic expansion of 7.3 percent in 2017, the highest rate in the EU, the country has benefited from its growing global engagement.
Ireland has reaped manifold rewards and changes from an influx of foreigners and a concomitant integration with a community of nations. So has America, to an even greater degree – even though we just finished four long years with an Oval Office occupant resenting and rejecting them, and even though his nativist legacy lives on.
To fully grasp this Irish-American irony, it’s important to understand why so many Irish came here to begin with…
A Nation of Emigrants
Just as Ellis Island honors our nation of immigrants, Dublin’s EPIC museum illuminates Ireland as a nation of emigrants. The brainchild of a former Coca Cola CEO, the building reflects a corporate aesthetic higher on digital multi-media than on history. It features River Dance more than the 1845-52 Great Famine, which took a million Irish lives and forced a million more to go abroad. Together, they totaled nearly a quarter of the island’s pre-famine population, a level to which it has never returned.
That famine formed a fulcrum in Irish history. It was not simply a product of a potato blight that decimated the main source of sustenance for so many.
Rather, it substantially stemmed from 19th century free market fundamentalism and inhumane indifference. The combination allowed the country’s English overlords to continue shipping abundant food supplies off the island even as so many Irish perished. Landlords exploited the land tenure system to drive farmers from their homes when they could not pay their blight-induced debts. Some burned their former tenants’ cottages, leaving them to die in the streets and fields from starvation and disease.
The rationalizations for such practices? The crops and animals sent abroad were, as exports, not subject to Irish exigencies. And setting them aside for local consumption would supposedly put bad precedents and dependence in place.
It was not a case of let them eat cake. Some inadequate relief efforts aside, it was let them eat nothing.
Despite the museum’s relative inattention to that crucial, crushing stage in Irish history, EPIC is epic in several respects. Its exhibits highlight hundreds of Irish emigrants who’ve contributed so much to the world. For instance, in another irony, there’s a priest named Jim Crowe who has worked in Brazil’s impoverished favelas for decades.
One notable exhibit identifies world leaders of Irish descent. It features video clips of Obama (whose mother was partly of Irish ancestry) praising the green behind the red, white and blue; Reagan telling Gorbachev to open up the Berlin Wall; and Kennedy hailing the hope and agony that marked Irish immigrants’ voyages to America – including, though he does not mention it, the many who perished crossing the Atlantic.
What We Are
Back in 2018, the United States’ story seemed such a stark, dark contrast with Ireland’s. Today the comparison is much sunnier. We no longer have a president spilling demographic bile that cast Mexicans as rapists, New Jersey Muslims as celebrating 9/11 and many immigrants as vermin coming “to infest” America.
We instead have Joe Biden, who wears his heart on his sleeve, along with his predominantly Irish ancestry. Our national story has changed, at least for the moment, and maybe for much longer.
Biden has his first political and humanitarian crisis (Covid aside) as a surge of Central Americans, many of them minors, make their way here and Republican leaders rush to the U.S.-Mexican border to exploit the situation. Though the migrants’ numbers had been increasing in the last months of the previous administration, arrests soared to over 100,000 in February and more than 4,000 per day in March, jamming our detention centers.
Besieged by hyper-violent gangs (who force adolescents to join them), natural disasters and grinding poverty, these people are fleeing devastation for the United States, just as Biden’s ancestors did in the mid-19th century.
I am not saying that we should automatically greet them all with open arms. Legitimate political asylum claims aside, that could open the floodgates to ever-increasing flows. And that could in turn shred Biden’s presidency, including his plans to legalize the status of undocumented aliens already living here, such as “Dreamers” (undocumented migrants brought here as children) and many farm workers. There are no easy answers here.
But I am saying that we should respect that this current wave is demonstrating the same pluck, though not the luck, of the Irish and of all of our ancestors who made it over here over the years. And that our treatment of them must be driven by both our shared humanity and by a recognition of what we Americans are, in the best sense of the term: a nation of mongrels.
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