An Eastern Style Icon of St. PatrickFirst, Happy St. Patrick's Day! There are other sites that have all sorts of interesting things to say about St. Patrick, Catholicism, Irish Catholics in America, Guinness and all that. You don't come here for that do you?

Does any other American with Irish blood in his veins and even a faint fondness for blood pudding and rashers feel a bit strange about this?

Capitol Hill became a sea of green and white yesterday as thousands of undocumented Irish immigrants came out of the shadows to petition Congress for immigration reform.

 

Wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the words "Legalize the Irish", they came from Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and many places in between, rising before dawn to travel to Washington in specially chartered buses. - Denis Staunton in the Irish Times.

Well well.  I find this kind of lobbying by "undocumented" folks gross. And I'm not afraid to say it.  If any other Americans have a problem with it I'll be in a New York bar tonight drinking Guinness and spoiling for a fight. How can any citizen of the Republic respect people who say:  "We've been breaking your laws. Change them, please," unless those people are bootleggers living under Prohibition.

The website for this group pursues two  divergent rhetorical strategies.  Their mission statement yokes these alleged 40,000 illegal Irish with the 11,000,000  (give or take a few million) immigrants from Mexico and Latin America.

But in their "About Us" section the group makes a more appealing case based on shared history and ethnic ties.

Where would America be without the Irish? Where would Ireland be without America? These questions have to be factored into any debate about immigration. The Irish contribution, both culturally and economically, to the US has been enormous. America's friendship has been a source of strength for Ireland from the 1800s to today. 

If the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform demands that they be lumped in with the other millions of illegal immigrants, and be given some kind of legal status,  I'm perfectly willing to tell my ancestral cousins to go back home.  I doubt any  of the political energy for stricter immigration reform can be tamped by the knowledge that less 0.5%  of illegal immigrants in our land are Irish.

But, lucky for the Irish,  America has a much maligned tradition of picking and choosing its immigrants that they should try to rehabilitate.  Ellis Island has become a kind of American fable: "Come one, come all." But Ellis Island regularly sent back people with diseases and for a few decades we had a system for preferring immigrants from some places over others. I always found videos of Ellis Island played in my high school history class to be funny  for the very reason that they couldn't decide whether on balance the history of Ellis Island was admirable or shameful.