Eamonn McCann: "Hispanics without a visa are 'illegal'. The Irish are 'undocumented'." | Hotpress
By: Eamonn McCann (Hotpress)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
While the plight of Irishman Keith Byrne earned deserved sympathy at home, the fact remains that the Irish in America enjoy a status not bestowed on other immigrants.
There was warm sympathy across the Irish media for Cork man Keith Byrne when he was targetted for deportation from the US last month.
Mr. Byrne, a builder, had entered the US in 2007 and stayed on after his 90-day visa expired. He met, fell in love with and married Keren, a nurse. They and their three children - one of them Keren's from a previous relationship - lived quietly in a Philadelphia suburb until July 10, when Keith was arrested by Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE) agents on his way to work. He was put in handcuffs and shackles, taken to Pike County prison, lodged in a cell and told to prepare for deportation.
He had applied for a Green Card in 2009 on the basis of marriage to a US citizen. He had been open about a 14-year-old conviction in Ireland for possession of a tiny amount of marijuana. His case for legal status dragged on until his detention.
Keith and Keren's co-workers have launched a campaign against his deportation. Coverage in local media has been uniformly positive, depicting Mr. Byrne, accurately, as a hard-working family man and an asset to the community. Mr. Byrne and his family are entitled to feel badly done by. Then again, they haven't been as ill-used as Hispanic people on the Southern border. Had Keith been Mexican, he'd have been booted out before his shackled feet had touched the ground.
MOST POWERFUL CATHOLIC PRELATE
Consider, by way of contrast, Irish-American involvement in the case of Eric Garner who was seized in July 2014 on the street in Staten Island and choked to death by a New York police officer. Phone footage shows Garner, an African American, being held to the ground with a cop's arm across his throat. He is heard to moan "I can't breathe" 11 times.
The death was ruled a homicide by the NY City medical examiner. The incident galvanised the Black Lives Matter movement. "I Can't Breathe" became a common slogan on protest placards.
A conclusion of sorts seemed to have been reached in early July, when a judge ordered NY police commissioner James P. O'Neill to sack the officer concerned, Daniel Pantaleo. At the time of writing Pantaleo remains on the payroll.
The chief of the NY Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, Patrick J. Lynch, denounced the judge's order as "political insanity… It would paralyse the NYPD for years to come."
Trump has weighed in from Washington to describe Pantaleo's predicament as "heart-breaking."
Last March, Commissioner O'Neill was inducted into the Irish American Hall of Fame by New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan. This was a seriously big deal in Irish-American papers and county associations.
Lynch describes himself as an "Irish patriot". He has described Black Lives Matter as "subversive". When two police officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liud, were shot dead in December 2014 by a deranged man who had earlier killed his girlfriend and went on immediately to kill himself, Lynch called for a "militarised" police force. He has publicly raged against mayor Bill de Blasio for giving mild support to Black Lives Matter.
The Irish in America are at least as likely to be dishing out ill-treatment to minorities as to be on the receiving end. Hispanics without a visa are "illegal". The Irish are "undocumented".
The disparity in status can be traced back to the efforts of Tyrone-born John Joseph Hughes. He had arrived in America to work as a gardener in the 1830s before becoming a seminarian, then a priest, a bishop and, by the late 1850s, archbishop of New York and the most powerful Catholic prelate in the land.
Hughes plunged into politics, lobbying in Washington, becoming a regular at the White House, arguing for full legal acceptance of the Irish as American and for effective control by a dependable Church over the formation of Catholic children.
WELCOME ON THE MAT
The Irish were already better-placed for advancement than most other ethnic groups. In his revelatory book, Famine Irish And The American Racial State, Peter O'Neill of the University of Georgia takes as his starting point that the first-ever US citizenship law, the Naturalisation Act of 1790, lays down that, "any alien, being a free white person," became eligible for citizenship after two years' residency. Thus the Irish, relatively soon after arrival, acquired a status they'd never known under British rule in Ireland - a status not available to black, brown or yellow people.
The Irish poured into service of the State. "If you're Irish come into the parlour/ There's a welcome there for you/ If your name is Timothy or Pat/ So long as you come from Ireland/ There's a welcome on the mat."
At one point, every fire fighter in San Francisco was Irish. Some New York police precincts were overwhelmingly Irish. The boys of the NYPD choir singing 'Galway Bay'. The Church supervising the process had a large element of Irishry, too: almost every priest in black-and-white movies was called "Fr. O'Brien".
Irish-Americans can remain fiercely anti-British while refusing to countenance hostility to the US.
I recall visiting the US to speak of civil rights in the North and discovering to my initial bewilderment that the organisers of my trip referred casually to African Americans as n----s and thought the Vietnam War the finest play under the sun.
Famine Irish is the best book about the Irish in America ever written and crucial to understanding the case of Keith Byrne.
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Funny how some people so against immigration turn a blind eye to other parts of the country.
... getting stupid drunk on our whiskey, eating our potatoes, voting for republicans, molesting pre-teen girls wearing school uniforms, taking all the unskilled jobs meant for the mentally challenged. /s
As a white person raised in the North among a high percentage of Irish Catholics....this is very true
How can a country built on the diversity of immigrants survive without them?
Because we have too many now, at one time immigrants were needed but things do fill up eventually
Do you feel this way about immigrants coming from Northern/Western Europe?
every damn one of them from every place
Some may call them Undocumented or illegal or other but wherever they come from feral cats is a suitable reference
You do realize that without immigration we will be in the same position as many European countries and of course Japan. We have a falling birth rate and have had it for some time. Now you may think it's a good thing but I would suggest that you do a bit of research on the subject and see the ramifications to a stagnant or falling population. Start with social security.
Which implies that you view them a wild animals. Why?
for starters:
Climate Change, that so many are complaining about will be reduced
Overcrowding
pay rate, lower population will raise wages faster than minimum wage laws
Less infrastructure will be needed
Social Security will be a rise in costs for a time but then the lower costs of problems that overpopulation is now causing will offset that
Ya, birds and raccoons and squirrels and deer and and and do the same thing. We don't demean them by calling them 'feral'.
You know that those that immigrate are already part of the world population right?
Really? How?
Perhaps less housing but we will still need infrastructure. High-speed rail isn't about the number of people but about TIME. We'll still need new bridges and dams and water purification and electricity and wifi.
In reality, SS is a EASY fix.
WHAT problems are overpopulation causing right now?
Climate change
poverty
overcrowding
even a shortage of sand that is discussed in a current post here
Overpopulation multiples almost every problem
if we keep them out they stay somebody else's problem not ours
Nope, the climate change is a global problem.
Overpopulation doesn't inherently cause climate change. How we create power is.
There are sparsely populated areas even here in the US were poverty abounds.
Overcrowding doesn't mean the country is overpopulated. There are MASSIVE areas of this country that are just about empty.
As for sand, they need to recycle more...
I think you are conflating the concentration of population with overpopulation.
Spread the fuck out...
The US isn't overpopulated, Charger. There are vast areas of the US with a minimal population. Spreading out might be a good idea, ya think?
The older the population the more is paid out in benefits with a smaller number of younger people paying into the system. What do you think the end result will be?
Currently (2019) it's 2.8 workers for every retiree. It has been dropping each and every year.
I agree and it makes for really shitty service at a fast food joint anymore as well.
lol
But they will count against somebody else's total in the plan
Both are bad problems
A 'ponzi scheme' with a cap for 'investment'?
All we need do is eliminate the SS cap, easy peasy.
Secondly, SS isn't going bust, the 'government' need only pay back what it's borrowed from the trust, with interest, just like it does for other creditors.
Yet not the SAME problem.
You must have missed the question mark.
Just like unemployment.
Why?
No, I just want high wage earners to pay SS taxes on the SAME percentage of their income as everyone else...
Why? There is a cap on benefits, just like there is a cap on unemployment payouts.
Boy howdy.
That's were we differ Tex. I don't think there is any reason to exacerbate the financial problems of those living at or below the poverty line.
So can birds and racoons and squirrels and deer...
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For starters, how dishonest , or ignorant, do you have to be to believe the media doesn't cover illegal Hispanics favorably?
So you think people from the southern border are covered favorably?
Yeah sure. That is why we have an article here everyday about how they are going to destroy everything...
Also they are constantly covered while others are not.
All the time.
at is why we have an article here everyday about how they are going to destroy everything
Yes, opinion pieces. Not the "objective" news which does nothing but provide sympathetic coverage for illegal aliens.
Also they are constantly covered while others are not
What percentage of illegal aliens do you imagine are Irish? Latino?
Illegal is illegal is it not?
While I think the basic concept here is important and I agree there is bias. The way this is written - at least what's on the page here - looks like it tossed three concepts into a literary blender. It doesn't make me want to go to the article and read the rest.
This is the second article I've gotten to today that is just not right.
That argument wasn't made anywhere in the seed.
Yes.
NO, here is the post:
Use your imagination.
I don't have to use my imagination, I read and replied to it before it was deleted.
I did and do.
What a mess. What is going on with this bizarre anti-Irish screed?
There is such a thing as Irish media? (I admit I'm surprised to hear that, although considering the loose commitment to facts by the author, I wonder if it's true.) Are we talking about Irish media in the US? Or in Ireland? We will probably never know.
They're sympathetic to a fellow Irishman? (Not surprised). Is Hispanic media sympathetic to Hispanics? Duh!
A false claim offered with no evidence
OK, that's not true, and no evidence is presented here that it could possibly be true. There are literally millions of illegal aliens from Mexico. The numbers of Irish immigrants - legal or otherwise - is not close to the numbers from Mexico.
I feel like anyone who thinks this is true probably doesn't know much about the history of Irish people in America.
When America Despised the Irish: The 19th Century’s Refugee Crisis
And there is lots more
Since when? The move to refer to illegal aliens as "undocumented" has been promoted by advocates for hispanic immigrants far more than for any other group.
Is that so? At the time of writing? According to the link for this seed, this article was published on August 19, 2019. On the exact same day, the New York Times reported that Officer Pantaleo had been fired.
Daniel Pantaleo, Officer Who Held Eric Garner in Chokehold, Is Fired
Not only was he fired, he was stripped of his pension benefits.
Why does it matter that the police commissioner is Irish? Pantaleo is an Italian name. Where is the evidence that Daniel Pantaleo got the special Irish treatment? Why would he?
Ironic that when one writes or talks about illegal immigrants from white countries, ie, Ireland, folks start getting their knickers in a twist.
... just as predicted. bwah ha ha ha.
This article isn't even about that. It references ONE Irish person who is here illegally. ONE.
I'm not upset. Just pointing out how full of shit this article is. Care to comment on any of that?
You actually think there is only one?
Amazing isn't it. Comments about the article lies, comments about the numbers etc.
Well data shows that in 2018 over 2,500 from Ireland alone.
You actually think I wrote that? Wow.
Then what was the point of emphasizing that the article only mentions one...
As it would somehow be relevant.
Do you read the comments? I responded to a comment that claimed the article was about "illegal immigrants from white countries." It's not. It's not even about just immigration, nor is it about white countries, nor is it about immigrants plural. It mentions one illegal immigrant and then whines that alleged Irish media is sympathetic to his particular problem. That's why it's relevant.
Since the article 1) doesn't stay focused on immigration but then 2) claims to contrast the situation of that one Irish illegal alien with the George Floyd case by 3) going after the Irish police commissioner (not an illegal immigrant, as far as we know), and 4) further accuses them of being "likely to be dishing out ill-treatment to minorities," based on zero evidence, I think it's reasonable to conclude that the whole point of this article was to shit on the Irish.
Even badly written, the whole point of the article was to say how different ethnicities are treated differently.
I have never once seen you complain about all the articles that shit on Mexican people or people from Central America.
Yet one article about Irish people and oh no, can't have that.
wrong. it was to shit all over dumb ass hypocrites. sorry if anyone was offended 3x.
For example?
I have no special love for the Irish. That aspect doesn't matter to me.
I made a long comment that addressed specific components of the article. You have responded multiple times now, but every response is about me and my motivations. You haven't addressed any part of my actual comment as it relates to the content of the seed.
So what was the point of seeding the article? Clearly, it wasn't to discuss the article because I have tried that and you're not interested.
Well, it did a piss poor job of it because it didn't highlight any hypocrisy or individual hypocrites. It made a few wild claims about how people are treated differently but offered no proof. Then it tried to compare two things that have nothing in common with each other, and tried to blame an Irishman for not firing an Italian, even though he actually did fire him. "Clusterfuck" does not do justice to the mess that is this article.
I anxiously await your unique perspective on the illegal irish invasion taking place.
Think what ever you want. When you complain that it only addressed one illegal person, I did comment about what you said about the article.
I also know the motivation of the daily articles about the border we see here from right wing patrons.
You decided to post about Irish people from centuries ago that has no bearing in todays world.
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That wasn't a complaint. That was a statement of fact that rebutted someone else's claim that the article was about immigrants (plural and generally). My comments about the article are @5.
I heard it was pretty good.
... every bar on St. Paddy's Day.
I think it's nice that everyone can take a day to celebrate the Irish. We do it with Mexico, too on May 5. We should have more days like that.