Returning emigrant finds Irish peculiar
Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007Today’s Irish Times Health Supplement takes a look at a returned emigrant who, recently diagnosed with cancer, is seeking to set up a centre for people who are looking to cope with a “life challenge”.
While the focus of the article is on business consultant Joseph Daly’s fight against his ailment and intentions to set up the Tamhnach Center, it also contains some interesting thoughts on his return.
Joseph came from Longwood, Co Meath and left Ireland to see the world after finishing school. He lived mostly in South Africa but also in Germany and Greece, and traveled extensively. Of his return he says:
We found settling into Ireland one of the most difficult things we had ever done. It is my home country but so much has changed in the past 20 years. We found it easier settling into a completely foreign country like Greece where we knew nobody and spoke a different language.
The Irish are peculiar. If you have been abroad and have been successful in any way, there is a certain begrudgery; you are seen as coming back with fancy ideas.
Read the article on the Irish Times website.
Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform responds to NY Times
Tuesday, December 12th, 2006Niall O’Dowd, the chair of the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform in New York, has a spirited reply to yesterday’s New York Times article critiquing his group’s efforts. In a letter to the editor published today, O’Dowd says that he is sorry the journalist didn’t stay for the group’s full meeting, as he might have heard uncodumented immigrants describing the difficulties of their plight; O’Dowd describes two women, one who held “a wake without a body” in the Bronx to mourn her brother, killed in a car crash in Ireland, and the other who relayed the sadness of her aging parents as they prepare to spend another Christmas without their daughter.
O’Dowd says:
He might have also heard that out of 1.2 million green cards issued last year, Ireland got about 2,000, and that there is no legal way for the Irish to emigrate here anymore.
These are serious issues, and ones that my organization was set up to address. We make no apology for doing so, the same as the Hispanic or any other lobby should make no apology for advocating for its people.
O’Dowd adds that the organisation has a good working relationship with other ethnic groups through membership in umbrella group Comprehensive Immigration Reform Now.
Read the letter on the New York Times site.
NY Times article examines Irish lobbying efforts
Monday, December 11th, 2006The Irish movement for immigration reform is covered in an opinion piece that appears in both Saturday’s New York Times and today’s International Herald Tribune. Titled “How green was my rally”, the article by New York Times editorial board member Lawrence Downes takes a critical look at the Irish lobbying effort.
Downes quotes Senator Charles Schumer as telling a rally of Irish in the Bronx, “The more Irish there are in America, the better we all are”. He notes that high-profile politicians regularly visit declining Irish-American neighborhoods, with the 50,000 Irish among the 12 million illegal immigrants in the US commanding a relatively large amount of attention.
Downes calls for a sense of inclusion in his concluding paragraphs:
[Schumer] is far from the only politician to be drawn to the white, English-speaking sliver of the immigration problem. That fondness for Irish audiences helps reinforce the odd sense of solipsism surrounding the Irish immigrant lobby. When you hear the chairman of the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform, Niall O’Dowd, vow to fight “to get what is rightfully ours” — more visas for the Irish — you can’t help wondering how quickly such words would get a Latino banished to the militant fringe.
“We Are America” is the Latinos’ and Asians’ cry. The well-organized Irish don’t feel the need to say that. Their slogan, on T-shirts and the Irish Lobby’s Web site, is blunt: “Legalize the Irish.”
The Irish have a just cause, but I only wish they and their many friends would preach the gospel of immigration reform in a bigger tent. It is, after all, every immigrant group’s fate to start out in this country unloved, as the Irish are only too eager to remind us.
The Sunday New York Times, where this article first appeared, is one of the most influential newspapers in the country.
See the article in the New York Times or the International Herald Tribune
US strips naturalised citizen of citizenship
Monday, December 11th, 2006The issue of the deportation of naturalised US citizens came up in a recent discussion with Éan members. Your correspondent did not realise that taking up citizenship was not an iron-clad guarantee against deportation from the US.
In fact, while US citizens cannot be deported, a naturalised US citizen can be stripped of his citizenship and then deported. The US government is currently trying to deport Haitian-born Lionel Jean-Baptiste, a 58-year-old former restaurant owner who served seven years on drug charges. He was arrested and convicted of the offence after he became a citizen; he still maintains his innocence. Government officials stripped him of his citizenship because, they said, his conviction demonstrated that he was not of “good moral character”.
Haiti refuses to accept Jean-Baptiste, saying that he is no longer a citizen under their constitution. The US then asked France to take him, but they refused. News reports say the US is going to turn next to the Dominican Republic. Jean-Baptiste has been in dentetion since June.
An administrative review will be held tomorrow. This is the first time since 1962 that a naturalised citizen has been ordered to be deported following a drug conviction.
The International Herald Tribune has more on the case.
The Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition has a good page of information covering deportation.
Emigrants’ NY memoirs published by Aisling Center
Thursday, December 7th, 2006
“While Mem’ry Brings Us Back Again” is a volume of memoirs by Irish emigrants who moved to the U.S. between 1927-1964. Compiled by Frances Browner, organizer of the Aisling Center’s “Young at Heartâ€? group, the book details the experiences of 35 different individuals from 18 different counties.
“Far from their families, friends and everything they were used to. Every one of them overcame homesickness and the challenges of a new world and built fine lives for themselves in this great country,â€? said Tim O’Connor, Consul General of Ireland, at the launch of the book on November 28. “These stories will delight, absorb and uplift you. They also underline again the amazing story of the Irish in America and just how good this country has been to millions of our people.”
Browner says of the emigrants’ recollections: “I was transported back 50 years and plunged into a place that was already forgotten by the time of my own arrival in 1987. Why did I not know all this before? Putting this book together may help keep these memories alive for future generations of Irish Americans to know what it was like to be a new arrival.â€?
New York’s Daily News carries a report on last week’s launch, in which it profiles Frank Bergin, an 82-year-old who moved to NY just before the 1929 stock market crash. He recounts being shot in Alsace in 1945 while fighting in World War II; he went on to become the president of the Irish Business Organisation of New York and still works selling real estate.
Order the book at the Aisling Center website.
There’s a 30-minute documentaryon the project and its launch available on YouTube. (Well worth watching!)
Society of Physiotherapists raises emigration issue
Thursday, December 7th, 2006The Irish Society of Chartered Physiotherapists has issued a press release headlined, “Minister urged to halt forced emigration of Irish physiotherapy graduates”.
The organisation says that it welcomes increased public health service funding in yesterday’s Budget, but says, however, that increased funding “will come too late for physiotherapy graduates who are currently facing the prospect of emigration due to serious planning failures in the health service”.
The ISCP says it is “gravely concerned” about the employment position of new graduates, noting that 71 (45%) of the 150 new graduates are either unemployed or working in unrelated jobs. The organisation suggests a number of recommendations “to address this crisis before new graduates are forced to emigrate”.
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