Funferal

More on regularizing undocumented Irish emigrants

Mark Dowling picked up on my coverage of the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform (in the United States) and linked the issue to current debates on immigration in Ireland. I had failed to do so, though I had originally intended to make the connection.
As with so much else I’m somewhat torn on this. First, many of these emigrants (from Ireland) have been out of the country for many years, so it is not necessarily fair to counter their claims with examples of current in-country Irish reactions. Second, charges of hypocrisy do not necessarily delegitimize any particular argument – rather, I have previously used the Irish approach to their emigrants to make arguments about the manner in which we should now approach immigration. Third, there is a reasonable charge to be made against Irish politicians and the government when they use political capital to lobby the United States to ‘regularize’ the status of undocumented Irish migrants, but then take a different approach to immigrants in Ireland.
Mark makes some good points – and highlights some of the shameful responses of the Irish public and government to our transition to a country with net immigration – but for the reasons outlined above I’m not sure I concur with his conclusion that undocumented Irish emigrants to the USA are undeserving of sympathy. Whether that sympathy at the individual level, for people who often left due to economic pressures many years ago and have now established their lives in their new ‘home’, should translate to preferential institutional responses is of course another matter.