Almost every day brings fresh news relating to Ireland’s vital relationship with the United States: declarations about tariffs; pharmaceutical companies threatening to abandon Europe; America threatening to abandon Ukraine (and by extension Europe as well).
Amidst all of these discussions, one unserious topic continues to be raised, particularly when Taoisigh travel to Washington DC bearing shamrock and uttering platitudes.
The great and the good speak in one voice: America must legalise the ‘undocumented Irish’ – those illegal immigrants who willingly entered the United States without permission and now find themselves living in the shadows.
No, America should not legalise the Irish who enter illegally. What is more, we should stop asking them to.
Precious time is still being wasted on a policy topic where the Irish goal is not achievable. As Micheál Martin pointed out in March, even if President Trump wanted to cut a deal, opposition in Congress would remain.
Most Americans believe in the need for an orderly immigration process – this is a key reason why Trump won in November – and if exceptions were being carved out, it is unlikely that they would be given to a country which refuses to join NATO while opposing America on many international issues.
The undocumented Irish is nowhere near as salient an issue as it was in those distant days when Senators Teddy Kennedy and John McCain were pushing for a mass amnesty.
Yet in a changed world, this silliness remains part of Irish groupthink. The Programme for Government states that the coalition will “[a]dvocate with the US Administration and Capitol Hill to advance the case of undocumented Irish citizens in the US.”
There are three fundamental problems with this approach.
Firstly, the number of the ‘undocumented Irish’ is, for the most part, largely inflated
When this issue became prominent in the Noughties, it was routinely stated that there were up to 50,000 Irish citizens living illegally in the United States, with a range of 15,000-50,000 frequently being mentioned.
Given how journalistic headlines and political soundbites work, ‘50,000 Irish’ became the normal reference point.
An online search of KildareStreet demonstrates how often leading Irish politicians referred to this enormous group.
In reality, it was far from enormous.
When the former Fine Gael TD John Deasy worked on this issue as an envoy in Washington, he soon acknowledged that the real figure was vastly lower, estimating that it was “closer to 10,000” – a claim which TheJournal.ie’s ‘FactCheck’ found to be ‘mostly true’ in 2017.
In the same year, a leading academic in the area of emigration described the 50,000 figure as being “pure invention…without a shred of evidence to support it.”
During an Oireachtas session in 2021, a member of the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform casually acknowledged that people had “changed the numbers from 5,000 to 50,000.” Quite the alteration, that.
That the Irish government and Department of Foreign Affairs had spent so much political capital arguing on behalf of a community whose membership was apparently 80% fictional received little attention.
Yet the broader issue is that the 50,000 figure should never have been believed. Ireland is a small place, with only a few degrees of separation between us all.
If there were 50,000 Irish people living illegally in the US, everyone would have a family member or neighbour among them. This was plainly not the case, and yet politicians pretended for years that it was.
Secondly, the illegal Irish have broken the laws of a crucial ally.
They did not accidentally fall into this situation. They entered America under false pretenses, and repeatedly broke laws which were passed democratically.
They ignored the complex immigration system which so many millions of would-be Americans from across the world participate in patiently, including many Irish people.
More to the point, they did not do this to escape the grinding poverty of ‘Angela’s Ashes.’
The political fervour over this issue was at its height in the Celtic Tiger era, when there was full employment.
Aside from the perioding following the 2008 crash, emigration from Ireland has been a question of choice rather than necessity for the last 30 years.
Tales of many Irish construction workers toiling in America’s black economy may be true. If they are, then perhaps those same construction workers would be best advised to come home, and contribute to building the homes which Ireland needs?
Why should an Irish government struggling to cope with a domestic skills shortage spend time trying to keep Irish workers in other countries?
An Irish passport is a precious thing, and no matter what Irish citizens have done on foreign soil, they always deserve consular assistance from the Department of Foreign Affairs and the broader government.
What they do not deserve is for Irish foreign policy to be specially constructed so that we are required to advocate an open borders approach in countries which have every right to manage their own affairs.
Thirdly, and most importantly, the crusade on behalf of the mythical 50,000 was always part of a wider campaign to delegitimise rules restricting immigration, including Ireland’s own laws.
In America, those who demand unrestricted immigration say ‘America is a nation of immigrants’ in order to get their way.
In Ireland, those who demand unrestricted immigration say ‘Ireland is a nation of emigrants’ in order to get their way.
Both statements are both true and irrelevant. All countries are nations of emigrants and immigrants alike: no country on Earth has been untouched by the movement of the human species.
Every country, including the US and Ireland, also has a right to govern that movement: to say who gets in and under what circumstances the process occurs.
Official Ireland’s longstanding hostility to America’s reasonable immigration laws – and its disinterest in finding out the actual size of the illegal Irish cohort there – is emblematic of a deeper instinct which also applies here.
The former Justice Minister Helen McEntee’s 2021 amnesty for illegal immigrants in Ireland was pushed through, as Gary Kavanagh found at the time, in spite of the Department of Justice not having “any official data on the number of undocumented people in the State.”
When the bill was passed, rather than emphasising the importance of people following the rules passed in Dáil Éireann, McEntee stepped outside to celebrate openly with the lawbreakers she had aided.
Just as amnesties purposefully dilute the strength of immigration law, the terminology which open borders advocates use is designed to ensure there is an unlevel playing field in public discourse.
The euphemism ‘undocumented’ is used instead of the correct term ‘illegal,’ first in America where Trump is the pantomime villain, but increasingly in Ireland as well.
It needs to stop. At a time when Ireland’s economic model is imperilled by steps which the US administration may take, we no longer have time for distractions.
Ending the government campaign in support of 5,000 or 50,000 Irish people who chose to break America’s immigration laws would be a good place to start.
After all, there are worse places for Irish emigrants to be sent than home.