Skip to main content

Perspectives on Immigration in America

 

Perspectives on Immigration in America             Gerry OShea

Joseph J. Salvo, the son of Italian immigrants from the Bronx, retired recently as the chief demographer for the City of New York. His work focused on providing analysis of the city’s changing population.

Asked in an interview in the New York Times about the prospects for economic recovery after the Covid crisis, he said that he was optimistic because of the city’s continuing draw of new immigrants.

He pointed out that the population of New York City is 37% foreign-born and if you add the first generation, the figure exceeds half of all New Yorkers. Mr. Salvo is convinced that their talents and hard work will bring the city back to its previous glory days. The only real threat, he warned, is “if we stop attracting immigrants.”

Immigration policies and attitudes were central to last year’s presidential election. Donald Trump launched his first campaign for the presidency by brashly attacking Mexicans and accusing them of “bringing drugs --- bringing crime --- they’re rapists.”

 During his four years in office, his MAGA rhetoric and actions remained hostile to foreigners coming to America, and he rescinded the popular Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.  A Pew report showed he was pleasing a big audience as 53% of Republicans and 24% of Democrats believe that immigration has a negative impact on life in the United States.

It is hard to explain these numbers considering that nearly all Americans have family histories rooted in some other country. Even the former-president’s mother emigrated from Scotland and he claims incorrectly that his father was born in Germany – a puzzling confusion with his grandfather.

 The current president is very proud of his Irish heritage, and he knows that when his people came to the United States they faced venomous hatred from the powerful Ku Klux Klan and other xenophobic organizations who argued that the country could not accommodate hordes of destitute people from Ireland who, to make it worse, were mostly Catholics and thus had a presumed allegiance to Rome.

 President Biden insists that the migrants on the Southern border must be treated humanely partly because of his knowledge of the travails of his own ancestors. Significantly, one of his first actions in the White House was to restore the DACA law which covers children who came with their parents to the United States in their very early years.

Immigrants comprise around 15% of the population in the United States, but they are 80% more likely than native workers to become entrepreneurs. Many of the construction companies in the tri-state area are owned by people who were born and educated in Ireland. Silicon Valley is often spoken of as an Asian enclave because so many people from that part of the world continue to lead the computer technology boom there.

Some workers blame immigrants for the low wages that have prevailed in most sectors during the last half century. Using tax records, researchers debunked that myth. They found that salaries were slightly higher in immigrant-founded firms versus native-owned businesses.

One of the companies that in recent times created a massive number of jobs in America originated in South Africa. Elon Musk built the Tesla plant in California, spawning more than 50,000 new employees and injecting 4.1 billion into that state’s economy, just in 2017.

Of the 122 Americans who won the Nobel prize from 2000 to 2018, thirty-four were immigrants. Eight of the forty-one Fortune 500 companies started since 1985 were founded by people from abroad.

The Congressional Medal of Honor is awarded for “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life, above and beyond the call of duty” in wars against enemies of the United States. About 3480 of these prestigious medals have been awarded to members of the American forces from all ethnic and national backgrounds since the medal was initiated in 1861. Amazingly, more than half of the recipients were Irish-Americans, of whom 257 were born in Ireland.

Samuel Johnson, the great eighteenth-century English intellectual, aptly described patriotism as “the last refuge of scoundrels.” The denizens of the far-right, the louts and misfits who attacked the Capitol in an aborted January putsch  to overturn legitimate election results, proclaimed their patriotism at every opportunity. They certainly merit Johnson’s dismissive definition.

 These self-declared patriots nearly all oppose any kind of immigration reform because they want a country with a dominant white elite in control. The Medal of Honor heroes, immigrants and their sons, fought for a very different vision of what an American patriot should espouse.

Fox News regularly reinforces the nativist theme of marauding immigrants terrorizing people in border areas across the South. Studies show that this kind of hateful propaganda resonates especially in areas where few immigrants live.

The Cato Institute in an important study compared the crime rate of immigrants to people born in Texas and found that in 2016 the homicide conviction rate for native-born Americans was 3.2 per 100,000 and 1.8 among illegal immigrants and half that for those who arrived legally.

The men and women fleeing their own countries in Central and South America want a better life for themselves and their families. So it was with the Irish and the Poles and the Italians and the Jews in times past. All of these groups faced loud anti-immigrant rhetoric similar to the taunts against today’s refugees.

There are Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers in every state. About 70% of these places are run by for-profit companies, some of which earn in excess of a billion dollars annually.

Southwest Key Programs, a registered non-profit organization, was paid close to 1.9 billion by the government over the last decade. Southwest runs detention centers for children that have little to recommend them from a humane or caring perspective.

However, while the children are treated poorly, the people at the top do very well indeed. The head of Southwest was paid an annual sum of 3.5 million dollars for his leadership, and his wife collected a tidy $500,000 the same year. By comparison in the non-profit sector, the head of the Red Cross earns an annual salary of $686,000. There must be a cold corner of Hades reserved for people who make millions while disregarding the wellbeing of poor children in their care.

The human dimension is the most heart-rending aspect of many immigrant stories. Their poignant tales should be heard by a wider audience. Parents fleeing gang lords just to avoid complying with orders from these hoodlums. Others combine their limited finances to send one family member to America who then remits back the dollars that will allow another to travel – and so on.

All these people fleeing from tyranny have lived in dire circumstances. In one of the heart-rending stories from last year, thirty-nine young North Vietnamese were asphyxiated in a truck in Essex in England as they attempted to find a place to live and work. One of these young people, Pham Thi Tra, a 26-year-old woman, managed somehow to write a haunting letter to her parents before she expired: “I am sorry Mom that my path abroad did not succeed. I am dying because I can’t breathe. I love you Mom and Dad so much. I am sorry.”

Gerry OShea blogs at wemustbetalking.com

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Reflections of an Immigrant

  Reflections of an Immigrant             Gerry OShea I came to America on a student visa in the summer of 1968. I travelled with a college friend, Ignatius Coffey, who hails from Labasheeda in County Clare. We were attending University College Dublin (UCD) after completing a second year studying the Arts curriculum. As evening students we were making our way by working in various jobs because our parents could not afford to cover our living expenses. So, we arrived in New York on the last day of May with very few dollars in the back pocket wondering if this new country would give us a break. I had uncles and aunts in New York who were a big help in providing meals and subsistence. A first cousin’s husband, who worked in Woolworth’s warehouse in Harlem and who was one of about six shop stewards in the Teamsters Union there, found us a job in his place, despite the line of American students knocking at the door. The pay was good and we worked every hour of overtime that we could

Child Rearing in Ireland in the 20th Century

 Child Rearing in 20th Century Ireland       Gerry OShea  It is a truism accepted in most cultures that children thrive in a supportive family and in a community where they feel valued and encouraged. The old Irish adage “mol an oige agus tiocfaidh se” (praise young people and they will blossom) contains  important wisdom from the ancient Celts. However, for most of the 20th century in Ireland, this advice in Shakespeare’s words  was “more honored in the breach than in the observance.” There were two important considerations that underpinned Irish child-rearing practices throughout most of the last century. First, contraceptives were not available until late in the 1980’s mainly because of opposition by the Catholic Church, so big families were an important feature of Irish life. Think of parents in a crowded house rearing eight or ten kids and obliged to maintain order in the family. Anyone who stepped out of line would likely be slapped or otherwise physically reprimanded. According

A Changing Ireland

  A Changing Ireland         Gerry OShea “ You talk to me of nationality, language, religion ,” Stephen Dedalus declared in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “I shall try to fly by those nets.” In response, one of his nationalist friends asked Stephen the bottom-line question “ Are you Irish at all?” According to the most recent Irish census that question is answered in the affirmative by no less than 23% of citizens who identify as non-white Irish. The number of Irish citizens born abroad, increased in 2022 and now accounts for 12% of the population. The biggest non-native groups come from Poland and the UK followed by India, Romania, Lithuania, and Brazil. In 2021, the year preceding the census, over 89,000 people moved to live in Ireland, with India and Brazil leading the way. How do the people feel about the big infusion of foreigners into the country? A 2020 Economic and Social Research Institute study revealed a gap between the public and private perceptions and a