Irish Immigration

5 Key excerpts on "Irish Immigration"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Columbia Guide to Irish American History

  • Timothy Meagher(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  It is crucial for students of the Irish in America to keep in mind that Irish migration to the United States has been only part, albeit the largest part, of the flow of migrants out of Ireland. This book is about the Irish in America and it will focus on their experience, but this story will be placed in the context of the broader story of the diaspora. Not to do so would be to distort the history of Irish migration to America and to eliminate or obscure critical dimensions of contingency and change from that story. For Irish immigrants who went to the United States did not have to go there, and knowing that they had other possible destinations sheds some light on their decisions to choose America. Furthermore, as historians of the Irish in Britain, Canada, and Australia have been quick to point out, studying Irish immigrants and their descendants in those countries provides a broader range of Irish experiences as points of comparison, and such comparisons help sort out the essentials of Irish culture and tradition, thus undermining facile conclusions about what was inevitable or typical in the history of the Irish in America. Historians of Irish Americans have sometimes explained the apparently puzzling proclivity of rural, Irish peasant immigrants to concentrate in American cities, for example, as if it were the inevitable result of Irish culture and experience, the strength of their communalism, or the intensity of their disappointment with farming after the Great Famine. Such historians, however, have been unaware or have ignored the fact that most Irish migrants to Australia settled not in cities but in rural areas, communalism or disillusionment with farming notwithstanding. The comparison between the Irish in America and those in Australia thus forces us to probe more deeply and examine more carefully Irish experiences in both places.

  In paying attention to Irish experiences in other nations and other continents, historians of Irish Immigration look at the same variables that they look at in probing the differences between regions or cities in the United States. They look at the nature of the economies and economic opportunities, the mixes and proportions of other ethnic groups, the laws or rules governing political and economic competition, and the specific backgrounds of the Irish who settled in those places.

  There is a final consideration in studying the history of an immigrant people and their descendants. Sometimes ethnic groups disappear. The descendants of immigrants no longer think that their ancestors’ origins are important and no longer even think to call themselves British, Scottish, German, or perhaps even Irish American. Does the story end there?

  Irish men and women had been coming to North America and what would become the United States long before the Great Famine of the 1840s. Indeed, hundreds of thousands came to America over the course of the eighteenth century. Most would settle in Pennsylvania or along the Southern Piedmont and frontier.

  Interestingly, however, they have left little trace of an Irish identity there. Historians still dispute whether those immigrants even thought of themselves as Irish, though they certainly came from Ireland. By the 1840s, when the famine Irish arrived, the Irishness of these eighteenth-century Irish immigrants seemed already forgotten by many of their descendants. And yet it would be a mistake—indeed, a distortion of the story of the Irish in America—not to include them here. The history of these earlier immigrants from Ireland is as much a part of Irish American history as the well-remembered famine exodus of the nineteenth century. How and why such an Irish group consciousness died or, indeed, may never have existed at all, is as interesting as why an Irish identity took hold and endured so long among later immigrants and their descendants.

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  The Making of Modern Irish History

  Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy

  • D. George Boyce, Alan O'Day(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Such work demonstrates the variety and richness of immigration and forms the starting point for re-interpretation of other aspects of the diaspora. But demography exposes no more than the tip of the iceberg. To date only a limited amount is known about how immigration influenced the shape of the receiving societies and even less is known of the impact of emigration on Ireland. Comparative studies are still rare and Oliver MacDonagh’s suggestion that though many more Irish went to America they were only 10 per cent of its newcomers, while in Australia, though fewer in number they represented a quarter of total immigration and thus had a more profound influence on the host community, is yet to be investigated in detail. 47 Brenda Collins makes a similar case for Scotland, arguing that the persistence of emigration to it ‘added undiluted peasant elements to partly assimilated groups of descendants of earlier Irish immigrants and together they formed a major force in modern Scottish society’ while John F. McCaffrey notes that Irish involvement in Scotland was part of a ‘dynamic, evolutionary process’. 48 These and other hypotheses demand further testing for the work done to date is only opening up new vistas. INTERPRETATIONS Interestingly, despite a huge literature on Irish migration, there is no standard account of the diaspora as a whole. Irish immigrants did not go unobserved anywhere, indeed, they usually became objects of derision. Anti-Catholic demonstrations were a sign of the fear these invaders evoked. Writing in the field was left to polemicists of an anti-Irish disposition or to Irishmen intent upon telling a story of perseverance and heroism. John Denvir’s The Irish in Britain (1892), typifies such writings

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  eBook - ePub

  British and Irish diasporas

  Societies, cultures and ideologies

  • Donald MacRaild, Tanja Bueltmann, J. C. D. Clark(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  Between 1790 and 1800 some 60,000 Irish emigrated to the United States, with a particular surge towards the end of the 1790s during the tumultuous period leading up to and after the 1798 rebellion. These arrivals in America were predominantly Ulster Presbyterians, the birthplace and stronghold of the Society of United Irishmen, though perhaps about 20 per cent were Catholic. 13 They took an immediate and active interest in American politics which has been recognised as very significant by US historians. 14 It is their retained interest in Irish politics, however, which is important for this essay. These radical Irish émigrés, who had established new cultural as well as political symbols for the Irish in Ireland, maintained and expanded them in America. Some, like John and Benjamin Binns, came via the Irish community in Britain and sojourns in revolutionary Europe. 15 Whatever their path to America, these radicals founded new ‘Hibernian’ societies with the cultural monikers of the United Irishmen, the harp and the shamrock, which future generations of Irish emigrants and Irish-Americans adopted as their own. Mathew Carey, for example, Irish immigrant and noted American economist, who sympathised with the United Irish cause from Philadelphia, founded a Hibernian Society to rival the more conservative, Friendly Sons of St Patrick. It quickly became the organisation to which new Irish immigrants arriving in the city affiliated

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  The genesis of international mass migration

  The British case, 1750-1900

  • Eric Richards(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  6 The simplest distinction is between forced and voluntary migration, between slave or convict migration and free migration. But this division is less definitive, which even the British case shows: indentured migration was an ambiguous category in terms of the actual exercise of free choice. Moreover the conditions surrounding emigration often severely circumscribed the options facing prospective migrants. The long historical narrative of emigration demonstrates many varieties and intensities of propulsion derived from the sheer force of circumstances. But some movements have straightforward causes, such as famine and expulsion.

  The efflux of people off the land is a universal and emotive question in many societies. Sometimes it involved the tragic displacement of entire peasantries, and was often depicted in folklore and song. It is even argued that coerced migration of this sort was a variety of genocide. When it entailed the erasure of entire communities, such claims contain a nugget of truth. But the forced movements of humanity are easier to explain than the greater mass of migration. Most emigration in the nineteenth century, and indeed in modern times, has been economic migration, of people volitionally seeking better lives for themselves and their children. But they migrated under widely varying circumstances, some clearly more desperate than others, some with a determination to improve or rescue the basic conditions of their lives and setting up for the next generation – emigration undertaken to avoid relative and absolute decline in status. But, even so, only a small proportion of such people actually emigrated.

  Within the British and European accounts of mass emigration there has been every variety of motivation. Political exile can be found in all decades; evictions caused people to depart; social and religious utopianism was recurrent; escaping military service and oppressive regimes was common enough; marital breakdown and new marital beginnings can be found in many cases; sheer eccentricity and inconsequentiality were rife. The list can be extended to cover virtually all human motivation. There is a disconcertingly wide and unruly variety of types, an extensive spectrum of cases.

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  New Immigration Destinations

  Migrating to Rural and Peripheral Areas

  • Ruth McAreavey(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 ). Challenges to migrant incorporation have been found in some localities alongside a more positive welcome.

  There is a perception of the erosion of values and obligations to wider society as a direct result of the establishment of migrant communities (Evergeti and Zotini 2006; Marrow 2011; Miraftab 2014), something that was apparent in Northern Ireland. Here ‘outsiders’ are often made out to be the problem, and in the past they have been blamed for straining public services, creating social unrest and for contributing to a lack of social cohesion (Lentin and McVeigh 2006). Service pressures include the perceived inadequacy of education systems (CRC 2007; Northern Ireland Strategic Migration Partnership 2014) and the lack of affordable housing (Campbell and Frey 2010; O’Sullivan et al. 2014). Conversely the evidence suggests net positive benefits of immigration in the region by helping to sustain economic growth and to make a net financial contribution (Shirlow and Montague 2014).

  This chapter presents a profile of Northern Ireland, including its significant historical legacies and its key characteristics (social, economic and demographic) in an attempt to illuminate the context for integration. It describes the political background and the way in which space has for a long time been contested in the region before examining, in some detail, emerging settlement patterns of migrants. This pays attention to the difficulties of measuring immigration. The idea behind this chapter is to provide a rich context for the subsequent chapters that analyse migration governance and everyday migrant encounters.

  A Snapshot of Migration Flows to Northern Ireland

  The numbers of Polish- and Lithuanian-born residents is now greater than those from China and India, previously the two largest established minority ethnic groups. Up to mid-2005, natural change accounted for most population increase, and from that point international migration to the region started to increase. By mid-2007 migration exceeded natural change. From mid-2007 more people left Northern Ireland than arrived, and it was only from mid-2014 that Northern Ireland once again experienced net inward migration (NISRA 2016), as Figure 5.1

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