Happy St. Patrick's Day!
History is often the same movie with a different cast. Watching and reading news reports over the weekend that President Trump may not be cracking down on immigrant communities as hard as some of his supporters would like (yeah, I had to read the headline twice myself) is a variation on a theme that has been the American tune from before the beginning of our nation. I am a verse of that song.
The Irish's arrival in America was, for its time, the largest and most prolonged migration of one ethnic group since the nations of the world began keeping track of such things. Those fleeing Ireland for America were not only family members, but extended families, whole neighborhoods, and, in many instances, entire villages and townships. All were half a step ahead of starvation and destitution.
To remain in Ireland was to die, but fleeing to America was often death of another kind, only more slowly. Having already been made into outcasts in our own country, immigrants hardly noticed how our treatment in the New World often resembled our handling in the old.
And still, we came, by the thousands every month, by the tens of thousands, and into the millions. At one point, very nearly twenty percent of all Americans were of Irish ancestry, which is a statistic offered today, Saint Patrick's Day, to help not just those of us who are and were part of the Irish Diaspora to remember where we came from but to remind all of us how far we have yet to go.
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