Thirty years ago, RTÉ aired a documentary, The Morrison Tapes, about four groups of Irish people who secured US visas of the same name and embarked on the time-honoured passage to the new world, via Aer Lingus flights to New York’s JFK airport.
It was a time of flux in Ireland: there was Ray Houghton’s goal against Italy in the 1994 World Cup and the Celtic Tiger was close to being conceived, but unemployment figures exceeded 300,000 a year earlier. The Irish enclaves of the big American cities were as crowded then as they might ever be.
That documentary riveted viewers that year. A decade later, when Ireland had become overripe and bloated after a decade of success, a follow-up documentary was made.
“In a very short period of time Ireland became practically unrecognisable from the way it was before,” Daragh Byrne, who directed both documentaries, told The Irish Times in 2004.
“The jury is still out on exactly what those changes have meant to society – and also on who is better off now: the ones who left for United States or the ones who stayed at home.”
The numbers of Irish “making a go” of life in the US has slowed to a trickle since then but that psychological pull of here and there, of both sides of the Atlantic, has never diminished.
There is a general feeling that the curtains began to close on the grand, operatic Irish-American story along with the end of the 20th century. The hundreds of thousands who availed of the Morrison and Donnelly visas have, in most cases, made prosperous lives here.
But there are many thousands who have also built full lives – families, businesses, home ownership – without ever attaining legal status in their adopted country.
The election campaign promises made by Donald Trump in recent months in advance of his re-election to the White House in early November – to embark on a concerted programme of mass deportations after he is inaugurated (for a second time) on January 20th – has once again shone a spotlight on the so-called undocumented Irish who have made lives without legal authorisation in the US.
It’s a return to the fear that spread through Irish-American communities during the first Trump term in office.
“I don’t think that there is need for special alarm for the Irish but there is no question that the president-elect has said that he intends to engage in mass deportation of anyone who is in the country unauthorised,” said Bruce Morrison, the man whose name graces the famous bill that made lifetime visas available to tens of thousands of Irish emigrants in the early 1990s.
Morrison, a prominent immigration lawyer whose firm is in Bethesda near Washington DC, drafted, during his time as a Democratic congressman for Connecticut, an extensive immigration bill which included a provision for 40,000 visas issued for three years to countries deemed disadvantaged by the immigration legislation passed in 1965.
Ireland received 40 per cent of those visas. That bounty made Morrison a folk hero for a generation of Irish young people: it changed their lives. He makes light of his reputation now while offering cautious advice as to whether the undocumented Irish in America have reason to be worried during Trump’s second term.
“So those people are at risk, but the extent of their vulnerability depends. You can’t make a blanket statement. Different people have different facts so it is always a bad thing to tell 11 million people they are going to be deported. Because 11 million people aren’t going to be deported tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that,” he said.
Morrison says there is “no great grand registry of people who are unauthorised”.
“They exist without documentation. Therefore, there is no record of them. So, if you are married to an American, you would long since have got a green card. If your kids are born here, they are citizens and they can petition for you if you overstay,” he said.
“One of the problems with the discussions of immigration is that it is always convenient to simplify, but immigration is not simple. The bottom line is that anyone who is unauthorised in the United States at the current time would be wise to arrange for consultation with a qualified immigration lawyer. They shouldn’t read the internet and decide what is going to happen to them.”
In March 2006, about 1,400 undocumented Irish gathered on Capitol Hill in Washington DC to petition for a reform bill that would grant them legal status. They wore white T-shirts that had the slogan “Legalise the Irish” and handed in letters of petition to representatives and senators. It was remarkable and rare: a category of people who, by necessity, survive by living in the shadows of US law and bureaucracy made a forceful, high-profile show. For once, they announced their presence.
The Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform had been formed just three months earlier and there was groundswell of optimism that a bill designed by Republican senator John McCain and Democratic senator Edward Kennedy would create a path towards legal status. Ultimately, the Kennedy-McCain bill did not pass.
Ciaran Staunton, who was one of the main advocates for reform then and has worked as a tireless campaigner for immigration rights since establishing himself as publican in New York in the 1980s, believes that a significant number of Irish who campaigned in Washington on that famous day decided to quit the United States after that disappointment and returned home.
Today, he counsels those who remain in legal limbo not to become unduly alarmed by Trump.
“I would give the same advice as when Trump was elected over secretary Clinton. There was a lot of scaremongering then. People should not get into a panic or react to the latest headline about being rounded up. The whole idea that any administration can back up a load of trucks into a neighbourhood and put a large number of people into them because someone believes they are illegal cannot happen,” he said.
Although the Irish story in America is less prominent now, Staunton believes that every effort should be made to help those who decided to build a life in America irrespective of their status.
“We must be concerned about them and try and see if there is a road for them to become legal. Some may be here five years. I know some people who are here over 20 years who are undocumented, with families and that. Many have American children in school,” he said.
“I am wary of giving exact numbers now but the big cities – New York, Boston, San Francisco, Philly, Chicago – would have a large number of undocumented Irish citizens.”
A recent figure had the number of undocumented Irish at 10,000. Other estimates put the figure as high as 50,000. It is a tiny fraction of the estimated 11 million undocumented people. During his first significant post-election interview, with US TV news network ABC, Trump offered mixed messages about his deportation plans. While he emphasised his promise to deport those with criminal records immediately, he conceded that he did not see the so-called “Dreamers” – children who were brought to the US without documentation – forcibly removed from their American lives.
“There are various versions of the Dreamers bill,” said Morrison.
“There is DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals], which is the Obama administrative approximation of the Dreamers legislation. But people who came as adults are not Dreamers. The children of people who came as adults, if born in Ireland or abroad, might be Dreamers.
Morrison notes that US-born people automatically become citizens, but then Trump has said he will attempt to end birthright citizenship by circumventing the 14th amendment to the United States constitution, the long-enshrined rule that grants citizenship to those born in the country to undocumented parents.
“Most legal scholars would scoff at the idea that you could say such people are not citizens. But that is just legal scholars, not the Supreme Court,” said Morrison.
Undocumented Irish have always found it easy to assimilate by virtue of their skin colour and because they speak English. There is no law in the United States enabling authorities to demand the presentation of papers from individuals going about their daily business.
The idea of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vans arriving into neighbourhoods and simply loading people into them is, Staunton believes, absurd.
Morrison points out that ICE cannot take people into custody without probable cause but he raises one note of caution about the circumstances through which the undocumented Irish came to be in the US.
Almost all undocumented Irish made it in the country through the US immigration system’s Electronic System for Travel Authorisation, or ESTA, the visa waiver that Irish tourists to the US will be familiar with.
“That provision is very convenient but it is also a waiver of all your rights so unlike somebody who arrived on a visa or who sneaked across the border, you don’t have any procedural defence. Those people have the right under the law to be brought before an immigration judge,” said Morrison.
“Those who entered under a visa waiver have no such right. They can be removed without going before an immigration judge. So that makes them more vulnerable, at least in the short run. But that’s if they are identified. Nobody knows who they are. So, their vulnerability occurs of something more than their status. See, we have no idea if this is for show or if it is intended to have an efficient result.”
In 1987, some 130,000 Irish people were working without documentation or legal status in the US. Gerry Reynolds of RTÉ sent home a riveting, lachrymose television report that year which looked at the latest hardship. A reform to immigration laws fined companies $10,000 for employing “illegals”, as they were called then. Irish immigrants who had found office jobs found themselves, as one young woman put it, “scrubbing floors now”.
There were graduates of commerce, of psychology, of office administration among those featured and many were living in over crowded two-bedroom apartments. Most affecting was a young Cork man who spoke of his bewilderment of trying to reconcile what he saw and heard with his official status.
“We are totally confused. The Irish community is an extension of the Irish-American community. It is hard to believe when you walk up Second Avenue in Manhattan,” said the man.
“There are so many Irish bars there, there’s so many Irish people, Irish-American people with the same name as you. It is just totally confusing that you are here illegally ... you just can’t understand it.”
The man recalled being on a busy Fifth Avenue in Manhattan during the St Patrick’s Day celebration when New York City comes to a standstill.
“I just couldn’t believe I was here in this country illegally and everybody was dancing around, there were politicians making speeches, Ronald Reagan sang when Irish Eyes are Smiling,” he said.
“But what I would say to Ronald Reagan is not many Irish eyes are smiling in Ireland today and not many are smiling among new Irish immigrants out here.”
And that was almost 40 years ago.
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