Luck of the Irish
Maeve Higgins
Cue the mournful fiddle music, please, and nod sadly as I tell you that when I was a child in Ireland, I stood often upon the shore and squinted across the Atlantic, dreaming of moving to New York City. And now bring in the beat of a bodhrán, our traditional wood-framed drum covered tightly in goatskin, to signify with growing excitement, triumph even, that I made my dream come true.
See me now, whirling around this city that never sleeps, bursting with that feeling you only get when ambition meets opportunity. Voices sing out: “Look at this good immigrant!”
But wait. Cut the music. This is all a bit much. My journey was not fraught. There was no huge obstacle to overcome, no great fortress to penetrate. In 1997, I was seventeen, and in that smooth “I want it, so I’ll take it” way of a middle-class white person, I simply moved here.
I got a job as an au pair with an Irish family in Rye, a small and comfortable New York town. I did not need to apply for a visa, the mother of the family explained; as an Irish citizen, I was covered by the Visa Waiver Program, which allows citizens of specific countries to travel to the United States for up to ninety days without having to obtain a visa. I could just stroll up to the US immigration agent at Dublin Airport and show him my visa waiver.
Things got even easier from there. As an Irish person, I enjoyed Preclearance from US Customs and Border Protection. This means that Irish people can go through a travel inspection that is basically customs as well as public health and agricultural clearance at their departure airport. This feature, found in many Canadian airports as well, is convenient, one less annoyance to deal with when you arrive jet-lagged and cranky.
Good for the traveler, and good for America. US Customs and Border Protection puts it like this: “DHS [Department of Homeland Security] firmly believes that establishing Preclearance operations in strategic locations will assist our efforts in identifying terrorists, criminals, and other national security threats prior to their boarding an aircraft bound for the United States.” In the past couple of years, DHS is working to expand Preclearance to countries like Sweden and the UK.
I thought little about this system when I was a teenager and benefitting from it. Today, I have thought about it. Preclearance does indeed make travel to the US easier for citizens of wealthy, white, stable countries, and more difficult for people from poor black and brown countries under duress. Preclearance is calamitous if you need to claim asylum in the US, because you can only do that once you reach US soil. By preventing people from getting into the country, you deny them the opportunity to claim asylum. Not only that, Preclearance goes against the policy of non-refoulement (a term I had never heard at seventeen), which the United States claims to ascribe to. The 1951 Refugee Convention forbids a country receiving asylum seekers from sending them back to a country where they face persecution based on “race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” By refusing admission to people before they even get to the US, the country can sidestep that rule. Of course, I never had to worry about claiming asylum anywhere. In my lifetime, the Republic of Ireland has overwhelmingly been a safe and peaceful place, a relatively prosperous one too. There are various indexes created by financial firms that rank global passports according to the access and freedom they provide to their citizens, and the Irish passport is one of the most powerful passports in the world.
Another thing I didn’t worry about was overstaying my ninety-day visa waiver. I simply overstayed, slipping overnight into my new undocumented status. Most undocumented immigrants in the US have done something similar, arriving by plane either with a visa or a visa waiver, and then just…staying. Two-thirds of approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US were once legal, until their visas or waivers expired. That’s one reason I cringe at calls to spend billions on a border wall with Mexico when not only are more Mexican people leaving the US rather than going to it, the narrative of smuggling yourself in is far less common than someone who is already just here.
I cannot speak for other undocumented people, current or former, but I can explain why I stayed. It was because I felt like it. I was enjoying my time in the US and had taken a gap year before college to do so. To remind you, I was a teenager and this was before 9/11, when immigration was not the viciously divisive topic it is today, and there was generally much less fear in the air around the idea of “foreigners.”
I was friendly with an older group of undocumented Irish people I’d met through another Irish au pair. They worked in bars and on construction sites around the city and state and were generous with advice. “If you get into an accident, try not to report it.” “If you get caught causing trouble, don’t make a fuss; be calm, and give a fake name and social security number if you have to.” “If you need to go to hospital, call this person, and they’ll explain what to do.”
Like most immigrant communities, we helped each other out. That means different things depending on where you’re from. I was never frightened when I was undocumented. Being white made me less likely to be profiled by any law enforcement official, and speaking English and sharing many cultural tropes with Americans allowed me to fit in easily. I suppose it stemmed from the fact that in New York, and in the US widely, the Irish are a powerful group. Our political and cultural currency is stronger than most. The Irish diaspora provides arriving immigrants with a huge and solid foundation. The value of goodwill shown to the Irish by Americans, while difficult to quantify, cannot be discounted, particularly when contrasted with the suspicion and racism faced by people of other nationalities.
The thoughtlessness with which I behaved is what strikes me today. Over the past two years, I’ve made a podcast about immigration and interviewed many undocumented people, none of whom share my former nonchalance. Having met so many immigrants who are consumed by the need of papers, or “papeles,” I acted with sheer breeziness, my comfort the surest sign of privilege there is.
In that gap year between my final school exams and my first year in college, I wanted to experience life in New York. It suited me. That is not a reality for many. The real fear felt by undocumented individuals and families with mixed status is growing by the day under the Trump administration. Living in the US without documentation is a civil violation, not a crime, but the detention of immigrants is gaining momentum month by month.
The day after Trump was elected, the biggest jump in stock went to the private prison industry, which also largely owns and runs immigrant detention centers. Shares of CoreCivic (formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America) and GEO Group, the two biggest players in the business, leapt 43 and 21 percent, respectively. Worse days for immigrants are coming. For the majority of the undocumented community, fear of imprisonment and deportation to a place away from their homes, work, and family have always factored into their lives and are reaching new heights today. As I write this, months after families were separated at the Mexican border, thousands of children have still not been reunited with their parents, and Temporary Protected Status has been stripped from half a million immigrants who argue that they still need it, badly.
Trump has played on the fear of foreigners from the time he began his election campaign, when he claimed Mexico was sending rapists into the US, right through to his first speech to Congress, in which he blamed immigrants for everything wrong under the sun, announcing a list, to be published weekly, of crimes committed by immigrants. His administration is desperate to equate immigrants with crime. All this, despite decades of irrefutable evidence that immigrants, with or without papers, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.
Trump’s Travel Ban 3.0, rejecting people from Iran, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, North Korea, Venezuela, and Chad, is now the law of the land, having been upheld by the US Supreme Court in December 2017. This third attempt at a large-scale restriction of travelers from a variety of countries, mostly with a Muslim majority, has succeeded where the first two failed. Possibly because this proclamation, issued in September 2017, for the first time includes two non-Muslim-majority countries, North Korea and Venezuela, and clearly invokes perceived weaknesses in those countries’ vetting capabilities. Travel Ban 3.0 is also different in that it has no expiration date. This ban strikes me as illogical too, given that relatively few immigrants from these countries make it to the US in the first place. Illogical, that is, unless the logic you’re working with is “Let’s make sure all the brown people know they’re not wanted here.”
None of this is new. Throughout its history, the United States has taken a racialized approach to immigration and naturalization laws. Between 1790 and 1802, Congress passed a series of naturalization laws, mandating that applicants be “free white persons” with “five years’ residence in the country” and “good moral character.” According to a 2002 report by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services historian, “US nationality law generally transformed northern and western European immigrants into US citizens.” Non-European immigrants were less fortunate, many finding it impossible to even get here.
Ethnic bias also played a part in US immigration history with the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which remained in various iterations until World War II, when it became a little too awkward to discriminate against the nation’s new allies, the Chinese. Then, as now, anti-immigrant sentiment was stirred up by an acrimonious presidential election, and white Americans were being squeezed economically. When the US Supreme Court upheld the legality of Chinese Exclusion in 1889, it did so on the grounds of national security. When first introduced, the exclusion act was billed as a temporary measure. You know, sort of like Donald Trump “calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
Back then, there were no protests against the ban at ports of entry, and there were few legal challenges. But Mae Ngai, a professor of Asian American Studies at Columbia University, points out some of the details in the so-called Muslim ban that have a chilling echo of the Chinese Exclusion Act. “The logic of Chinese exclusion was a racial one,” she says. “You could say the religious part of Trump’s order pertaining to Muslims is a new kind of racism, but the original racist argument behind the exclusion act was that Chinese cannot assimilate, that there is something about Chinese that makes them innately alien and unable to assimilate. That’s the same logic as Trump’s view that Muslims follow a hateful religion and that Muslims don’t love America.”
In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act was passed “to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity.” It limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national-origins quota and completely excluded Asian immigrants. Immigration and naturalization laws changed during the 1940s and 1950s, ostensibly to be fairer to Asian immigrants, but the changes amounted to only mere tweaks in the 1924 system while maintaining the quota policy.
As a result of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, 85 percent of the 154,277 visas available annually went immediately to immigrants of northern and western European lineage. It makes me think of our current president, with his rage-filled longing for more Norwegians. It’s so sad, really, that the old white man craves more blondes.
The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act eliminated the use of national-origin quotas and committed the United States, for the first time, to accepting immigrants of all nationalities on a roughly equal basis. The following years saw an increase in Asian and Latino immigrants and a decline in Irish ones, who had lost their lucky edge because of the new quota system. However, as a brutal recession ground on in the old country, thousands of Irish people decided not to wait for a legal path in: they came to the United States as tourists and, as I would do years later, simply stayed.
Irish American politicians tried to figure out what to do with these undocumented Irish people, and in 1986 they came up with the Donnelly Visa. Ostensibly, this was a diversity program lottery and was quite openly a way to help those undocumented Irish regularize their status. US Representative Brian J. Donnelly, Democrat of Massachusetts, oversaw the first phase of the program, under which 4,161 out of the first 10,000 visas in the lottery went to the Irish. They used a loophole that allowed them to enter the lottery multiple times, even holding parties to fill out multiple applications on behalf of one of their own.
In 1989, the diversity program became a truly random lottery, with only one entry per person, and the Irish received only 1 percent of the visas. The top three recipient countries were Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Egypt. But a new program a year later again favored European countries. Known as Morrison Visas, after their sponsor, US Representative Bruce Morrison, Democrat of Connecticut, these were distributed over the next three years to immigrants from countries disadvantaged by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. More than 40 percent went to Irish citizens.
In 1995, this became the diversity visa lottery we have today, the one that allows 50,000 people into the United States each year from countries with “historically low rates of immigration to the United States,” according to the State Department. It’s a program the current administration is now looking to axe, with the president regularly deriding it.
In case it isn’t obvious, I should point out that most of the politicians who helped the cause of Irish immigrants in the past were themselves Irish American. Ted Kennedy, Tip O’Neill, and the aforementioned Donnelly and Morrison all claimed Irish roots. As do many in every branch of the US government today, most of them loudly and with no small amount of pride. Ironically, some of the most virulently anti-immigrant people in the White House today are Irish Americans, including John F. Kelly and Mick Mulvaney.
Vice President Mike Pence, who once tried to ban Syrian refugees from Indiana, often lauds his Irish grandfather’s immigrant story. The grandfather, Richard Cawley, left Ireland in 1923, escaping a vicious civil war. Yet under rules in place at the time, Cawley would not have been allowed into the country had he been Chinese and likely would not have been able to get the job he did, as a streetcar driver, had he been black. And yet the New York Times quotes Pence addressing a group of Latino business leaders in March 2017, saying, “If you work hard, play by the rules, anybody can be anybody in America.” That isn’t true.
Race and ethnicity remain hugely significant in the story of immigration. After six months of washing bedsheets piddled on by toddlers for $150 a week, wandering around the city on my days off, not thinking twice about asking cops for directions, I didn’t want to be an au pair anymore. I returned to Ireland. There were no consequences for my overstay. Had I been caught, which was always unlikely, I could have been deported and faced a ten-year ban on returning to the US. The rashness of youth could explain why I took that risk, but I was wholly backed up by my confidence that this would not happen, that I would not get caught. And I didn’t. Your chance of being arrested or profiled by the police or by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is higher if you’re black or brown, and most Irish immigrants are white.
I do not wish to belittle the experience of many undocumented Irish people here who try every legal way they can find to regularize their status. Since Trump, they are worried now too. The most recent figures show a 30 percent increase in immigrant arrests made by ICE, with the number of Irish deported from across the US rising to 34 in 2017, up from 26 the previous year. In June of 2017 the Irish Government appointed an envoy to the US Congress to work on the issue of the undocumented Irish living here, who will work under the direction of the Minister of State for the Diaspora and International Development, Ciarán Cannon.
I met Minister Cannon at an Irish American event recently. I was one of the nominees for “The Voice of Irish America” and lost out to a lady who does cross-stitch, a fact that has given my best friend, Mona, something to tease me about for life. Whenever I express an opinion now, she tells me to sew it on a cushion and come back to her later. Undaunted by my loss to a needle and thread, I used my voice to ask the minister if he felt the powerful Irish Americans in this administration will help the cause of the Irish undocumented. “Of course it has to help. They’re the people we are engaging with, on both sides.” But he added, with a nod to Boston’s Irish American mayor, Marty Walsh (who is adamant on this point), that there must be a collective movement. “It’s not realistic to expect that a stand-alone solution will be provided for the Irish community…and it’s perhaps unjust.”
In March 2017, during the traditional St. Patrick’s Day celebrations at the White House, a usually good-natured affair, Irish prime minister Enda Kenny struck a serious note, calling for a solution for the undocumented community at large: “There are millions out there who want to play their part for America—if you like, who want to make America great.”
Kenny’s message fell on deaf ears; in the first year of his presidency, Trump revoked the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, leaving up to 800,000 people at risk of returning to undocumented status. His administration also ended Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Sudan. And he plans to cut legal immigration in half within a decade.
In 2013, I was invited to tell jokes at a comedy festival in Kansas City. The festival organized a P-3 visa, as I was an artist coming to contribute in a culturally unique way. I went over and did my work for a few days, but the visa lasted a full year. I lived in London at the time and hated it there, finding it as sprawling and lonely as all of its detractors say it is. I left London, and at a loss for what to do with myself, I went to stay on a remote island off the coast of West Cork. It was December, and I trundled around building fires and working up the courage to swim in the sea. I hadn’t been back to New York for a decade, but I thought about the place every now and then. I can’t explain why. I suppose it was a mixture of ambition and curiosity, but I felt I wasn’t through with the city—I wanted to try it again. One night something magical happened with the wind and I had full phone reception for a minute, long enough to read an email asking if I wanted to do a show at the Irish Arts Center in New York—one show—at the end of January.
I sat up in bed and decided I’d go live in New York again. I clambered up onto the chest of drawers to get phone reception and replied, saying I would. It was just an email I answered. It was just one foot in front of the other. That’s how things happen, I suppose. When there are few obstacles in the way.
A few months before my P-3 ran out, I applied for an O-1 visa, which means I am “an alien of extraordinary ability.” It was granted. I’m now on my second O-1 visa, so I regularly tell people I’m doubly extraordinary. That’s a joke, of course. I’m not extraordinary at all. It’s dumb luck that I was born white and Irish. And that luck, combined with a history of racialized immigration policies, meant that I was allowed to move here, to a country whose leaders look at me and see themselves, and welcome me with open arms as they push others away.