Elenamary

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.

While you are celebrating with your Irish-Ameircan friends, or your Mirish friends, remember to spill a little of your green beer for the undocumented Irish in the United States.

Today is a good day to remember that it is not just Mexicans or Latinos that are not legally in this country but Europeans, Asians and Africans, too. And a good day to remind people that it isn’t as simple as “getting in line” to come to the United States.

I want you to know and to spread the word that only “…147 new un-skilled workers without US citizen or legal resident family already here were allowed to enter the US last year [2006] legally and receive green cards.” -Migra Matters

And that there are undocumented Irish in this country who would like to be able to work legitimately, have drivers licenses and more importantly not live in fear. People sometimes see this as a race issue or an ethnicity issue and it isn’t.

“I was not very long there until, like water, I found my own level. ‘My people’ — the people who know about oppression, discrimination, prejudice, poverty and the frustration and despair that they produce — were not Irish Americans. They were black, Puerto Rican, Chicano. And those who were supposed to be ‘my people’, the Irish Americans who know about English misrule and the Famine and supported the civil-rights movement at home, and knew that Partition and England were the cause of the problem, looked and sounded to me like Orangemen. They said exactly the same things about blacks that the loyalists said about us at home. In New York, I was given the key to the city by the mayor, an honour not to be sneezed at. I gave it to the Black Panthers.” -Bernadette Devlin McAliskey

Next time some racist person makes the argument that the Irish were different than Mexicans, remind them that they aren’t different and send them to these links.

Voices from the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform/The Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform “The Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform (ILIR) is fighting for the voice of the estimated 50,000 undocumented Irish in the immigration debate.”

Far From Home: A chronicle of the undocumented Irish in the United States (images of undocumented Irish in the United States).

Undocumented Irish in the US (Irish politicians try to lobby for the Irish in the United States)

Irish Immigrants Visit Congress to Ask for Rights