This past month, we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day.  It’s a day where most of us claim to be a little Irish.  I found myself thinking about my vacation a few years ago to Ireland.

There was a very moving and educational art exhibit in Dublin Castle focused on the potato famine in the mid-1800s. At the time, Ireland was a one-crop country and for seven years there was a blight that destroyed potato plantings.  

Mass starvation started.

Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. England’s government was very reluctant to provide food aid.  British lawmakers were adherents to capitalism and did not want to interfere with the natural course of free markets. Many also regarded the Irish as lazy and deserving of their desperate plight.

When have we heard that before?

At the start of the famine, there were 8 million Irish. Over a million starved to death. Over 2 million emigrated to other countries, most to the U.S.  When the famine and resulting emigration finally settled down, Ireland had a population of 4 million.

Irish immigrants to America were poor, unskilled and Catholic. They were not welcome and the prejudice against them sometimes was violent.  There were attacks on Catholic priests and churches.  These immigrants took the most menial, dangerous and lowest-paying jobs just to feed themselves.

Various anti-immigrant political parties sprang up.  One was called the “Order of the Star Spangled Banner” and their platform called for a return of America to a land of “Temperance, Liberty and Protestantism.”

Similar parties coalesced into the Know Nothing Party. President Millard Fillmore ran for re-election on the Know Nothing ticket and finished third.

Abraham Lincoln noted our evolution of bigotry and intolerance. He said we started our country on the idea that “all men are created equal.” Quickly this became “all men except negroes are created equal.”  This then devolved into “all men except negroes, foreigners and Catholics are created equal.”

Eventually, Irish immigrants organized their voting power. One of their first platforms was that all Chinese immigrants must go. The Irish in America also didn’t want any more Irish to come in. They became the resistance they once faced.   

In fact, immigrants from every country of origin faced prejudice when they came to the U.S. Today, we love the beer the Germans make. We love to visit The Hill and eat good pasta.  We love tacos and margaritas and party on Cinco de Mayo. 

But we initially didn’t want Germans, Italians or Mexicans in our country.  

It is a curious but disturbing aspect of becoming Americanized that once here, you don’t want others coming – even from your own country of origin. Sometimes there is legitimacy to the concern that immigrants will take scarce jobs from Americans. Even so, American businesses profit from a surplus of labor that keeps wages depressed. 

There is no such concern today, as we have millions of jobs and no workers available to fill them.

In a country that includes religious freedom in its Bill of Rights, religious prejudice is even harder to understand.  American participation in religion today is at an all-time low.  Some believe our country is morally decaying as a result.  

Ironically, immigrants at our borders embrace religion far more than we do.  It’s understandable. The more a country’s government fails, faith becomes the only refuge and source of hope.  

But we don’t want to let them in. Where’s the real moral decay?

Some people make the distinction that they don’t oppose immigration, only illegal entry. The only thing that makes some immigrants illegal are our arbitrary laws, disconnected from the reality that our population is shrinking and our economy is constrained by a lack of labor. 

Virtually all of us are descendants of people who were unwelcome when they came to our country. Yet, when we see ourselves in the mirror of history we loathe what we see.

What is wrong with us?