Immigration is one of the hot button issues in Congress and in the media and seems to produce more heat than light in these discussions. To me, all of this sounds similar to the discussions that took place in the U.S. in 1847 except the “Mexicans” were the Irish, who represented the first large wave of immigration.
In 1847, Ireland was still under English control and, similar to today’s Mexico, a small number of people owned most of the land and used their land to grow wheat for export while their serfs were given an acre of the land upon which to grow the food they needed. One of the most common uses of the land was to grow potatoes. When this crop suddenly failed, Ireland’s 8,000,000 were faced with a Hobsian choice: They could either starve or emigrate. Over 1,000,000 were allowed to starve while over 3,000,000 emigrated to the U.S. When these poor, starving people started arriving in large numbers in the U.S., they were treated in the same way that Mexicans are today.
In 1999, former Governor Kitzhaber signed into law Senate Bill 771, which called for the Oregon Department of Education to prepare, and Oregon schools to teach, a unit of instruction to be known as the Irish Famine Curriculum. Ask your school district how to access it and read what those Irish immigrants had to face, how they were treated by the media of the day and the contributions to the U.S. that they and their descendants have made to this country before you decide your position on today’s immigration debate. If we don’t know our immigration history, we may be doomed to repeat it.
G. Dennis Shine
Springfield resident