By Jason L.
Riley
They arrived dirt poor and
uneducated in the 1840s. After decades of struggle, they achieved prosperity.
Every year in the runup to St.
Patrick’s Day, the Census Bureau releases a demographic profile of
Irish-Americans.
For anyone familiar with the arduous history of the Irish in
this country, the progress report is an annual reminder of America’s ability to
assimilate newcomers in search of a better life.
It was the potato famine that began
driving large numbers of Irish to leave home in the late 1840s. This migration,
along with mass starvation and disease, would eventually cost Ireland around a
third of its population. Some went to Great Britain, but the overwhelming
majority came to America.
Today the number of Americans of Irish descent
(32.3 million) is nearly seven times as large as the population of Ireland (4.7
million).
The peasants fleeing Ireland had a
shorter life expectancy than slaves in the U.S., many of whom enjoyed healthier
diets and better living quarters. Most slaves slept on mattresses, while most
poor Irish peasants slept on piles of straw.
The black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois
wrote that freed slaves were poor by American standards, “but not as poor as
the Irish peasants.”
The Irish who left for America were
packed into the unused cargo space of wind-driven ships returning to the U.S.,
and the voyage could take up to three months, depending on weather. These cargo
holds weren’t intended to carry passengers, and the lack of proper ventilation
and sanitation meant that outbreaks of typhus, cholera and other fatal diseases
were common.
Emigrants slept on 3-by-6-foot shelves, which one observer
described as “still reeking from the ineradicable stench left by the emigrants
of the last voyage.”
In 1847, 19% of the Irish emigrants
died on their way to the U.S. or shortly after arriving. By comparison, the
average mortality rate on British slave ships of the period was 9%.
Slave-owners had an economic incentive to keep slaves alive. No one had such an
interest in the Irish.
The 19th-century immigrants from
Europe usually started at the bottom, both socially and economically, and the
Irish epitomized this trend. Irish men worked as manual laborers, while Irish
women were domestic servants.
But not all ethnic groups rose to prosperity at
the same rate, and the rise of the Irish was especially slow. They had arrived
from a country that was mostly rural, yet they settled in cities like Boston
and New York, working “wherever brawn and not skill was the chief requirement,”
as one historian put it. In the antebellum South, the Irish took jobs—mining
coal, building canals and railroads—considered too hazardous even for
slaves.
In the 1840s, New York City’s
population grew 65%. By midcentury, more than half of the city’s residents were
immigrants, and more than a quarter of those newcomers had come from Ireland.
At the time, half of New York’s Irish workforce and nearly two-thirds of
Boston’s were either unskilled laborers or domestic servants. “No other contemporary
immigrant group was so concentrated at the bottom of the economic ladder,”
writes Thomas Sowell in his classic work, “Ethnic America.”
It wasn’t just a lack of education
and urban job skills that slowed the progress of the Irish in America. So did social
pathology and discrimination. The Irish were known for drinking and brawling.
Irish gangs were common.
When an Irish family moved into a neighborhood,
property values fell and other residents fled. Political cartoonists gave
Irishmen dark skin and simian features. Anti-Catholic employers requested
“Protestant” applicants. Want ads read: “Any color or country except Irish.”
Yet none of these obstacles proved
insurmountable. Charitable organizations, such as the Irish Emigrant Society,
emerged. Temperance societies formed to address alcoholism.
The Catholic Church
took a leading role in tackling poverty, illiteracy and other social problems
through the creation of orphanages and hospitals and schools. For millions of
Irish immigrants, the church was not simply a place of worship. It was the
focal point of the community.
According to the Census Bureau,
today’s Irish-Americans boast poverty rates far below the national average and
median incomes far exceeding it. The rates at which they graduate from high school,
complete college, work in skilled professions, and own homes are also better
than average.
What’s so remarkable about this social and economic trajectory
among the Irish is how many times it has been replicated among other immigrant
groups.
Whether this kind of upward mobility
is still possible today given the changes to our economy and culture is an open
question. My guess is that it’s still possible but more difficult—not because
of our modern economy, but because of our modern attitudes toward assimilation.
The type of Americanization of newcomers that once was encouraged is now
rejected by activists who push for bilingual education, Spanish-language
ballots and the like. The multiculturalists have turned assimilation into a
dirty word. Perhaps they’re the ones we should be deporting.
