Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all who celebrate!
I hope this is a good time to revisit two posts on Irish-American politics and history:
- “The Decline of the Political Significance of Irish-American Identity,” March 17, 2023
This post describes how and why the political importance of Irish-American identity has declined greatly over the last century, and what can be learned from this experience. An extract:
Today is St. Patrick’s Day. And tonight, Irish-Americans across the country will gather to toast their control of the highest political office in the land. After all, Joe Biden is only the second Irish Catholic president of the United States. For their part, millions of WASPs shudder at the loss of their political hegemony to the Irish. St. Patrick’s Day celebrations are a painful reminder of their humiliation. Police forces in major cities are on alert for possible ethnic riots.
OK, nothing like that is actually happening! In reality, very few Americans care that Biden is Irish Catholic. Even fewer fear that he is somehow promoting Irish interests at the expense of the WASPs….. The political conflict between Irish-Americans and the WASPs has almost completely disappeared….
It hasn’t always been this way. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, political antagonism between the Irish and the WASPs was ubiquitous, sometimes reaching the level of anti-Irish riots by nativists. There was also substantial discrimination and social prejudice against the Irish….
How did this change happen? The story is long and complicated… But a crucial factor was that most Americans realized that the differences between Irish-Americans and other groups were much less significant than previously thought, and also that these ethnic and religious differences should be downplayed in name. of universal liberal principles.
2.”Are Hispanics going the way of the Irish?”Jan. 1, 2024
This post comments on Noah Smith’s insightful article in which he argues that Hispanics are following the same path of assimilation followed by Irish-Americans in previous generations. I think Smith is largely right, but he offers two important caveats. Here is an excerpt:
Hispanics are by far the largest American immigrant group in recent decades, and also at the center of broader nativist concerns. Supporters of immigration restriction argue that Hispanic immigrants increase crime, undermine America’s political institutions and are unable or unwilling to assimilate. In a recent post, prominent economic policy commentator Noah Smith marshals evidence that these complaints are largely misplaced and that Hispanics are in fact following a similar trajectory to that of Irish-Americans in the late 19th and 19th century. beginning of the 20th century….
Today’s fears of seemingly violent and unassimilable Hispanics are remarkably similar to the nineteenth-century stereotype of the brutal, un-American Irish…
In [his]…article, Smith marshals evidence that concerns about Hispanics are largely false: in fact, they are rapidly assimilating, rapidly increasing their wealth and income, and have significantly lower crime rates than Native Americans (a point that also applies to undocumented immigrants). Most of this evidence is well known to scholars of immigration policy. But Smith does a valuable service in compiling it into a relatively short and easily accessible piece….
I would, however, note some relevant caveats to Smith’s thesis. First, it is not entirely true that Irish and Hispanic immigrants “were mostly working-class people who arrived primarily for economic reasons.” In reality, many Hispanic immigrants were and are refugees from the oppressive socialist regimes of Cuba, Nicaragua, and (most recently) Venezuela. Some others have fled repression at the hands of right-wing dictatorships….
A second caveat is that Hispanic migrants are a much more diverse group than the Irish. They come from a variety of different nations and ethnic groups. This makes generalizations about them more difficult….
Finally, while Irish immigrants arrived in an era when there were few restrictions on European immigration, many Hispanic migrants are undocumented. There are approximately 7 million or more undocumented Hispanic immigrants in the United States today, representing approximately one-third of all foreign-born Hispanics and more than 70 percent of the total undocumented immigrant population.
For obvious reasons, lack of legal status reduces migrants’ incomes and educational opportunities and prevents assimilation. The existence of this anchor makes the progress of Hispanics even more impressive than it otherwise would be. But unless immigration policy changes, it is likely to continue to slow the process of assimilation highlighted by Smith.