President Trump’s recent comments calling Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations “shithole countries,” has been met with strong reactions. House Speaker Paul Ryan, reflecting upon the hardships that Irish immigrants like his ancestors had once faced, called the president’s choice of language “very unfortunate" and "unhelpful” and said “the Irish were really looked down upon back in those days.” Ryan’s reference to the Irish offers a teachable moment about US immigration history, explains Hidetaka Hirota, a professor of American history at the City University of New York-City College and author of Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy. It was the backlash in large part against poor Irish immigrants that led to the first US immigration policies and law, Hirota says.
Read moreWoodside vs. Sunnyside: Battle of the Irish Pubs
Woodside and Sunnyside are two historically Irish neighborhoods in Queens, the most ethnically diverse borough in New York City. After our taco battle that pitted Brooklyn against Queens (Manhattan won, strangely enough), Carolyn and I decided on a new challenge: between the two great Irish neighborhoods of Woodside and Sunnyside, which has the best and most “authentic” Irish pub? We knew the task was going to be difficult. It was going to require drinking lots of beer and whiskey and eating pub food, but we bravely volunteered. We each picked three pubs (I picked three in Woodside and Carolyn picked three in Sunnyside), and out of those three we selected a winner for the other to try. In the end, could we agree on the best pub? The suspense is killing you, isn’t it? - JOSEPH MCKEOWN
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My Immigration Story
A series of posts by Daryanani & Bland staff sharing their own “immigration” stories—how they (or their families) came to America and/or how they came to work in the immigration law field.
My immigration story begins when I discovered my grandfather had an accent. As a child, I never recognized his Irish “brogue” (the word supposedly comes from the idea that the Irish sounded as if they spoke with a shoe in their mouths—“bróg” is the word for shoe in Irish), distinctive after more than fifty years of life in the US. I heard no difference at all in how he spoke compared to how my parents or grandmother (native “noo yawkahs”) spoke.
My grandfather was born in the Lanes of Limerick, Ireland in 1912. These same Lanes were made famous in Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, and there has long been speculation in my family that the hearse driver mentioned in the book was my own great-grandfather. Who knows—people love a good yarn! Certainly Summer Street in Limerick—where my grandfather grew up—is a short walk from the home described in McCourt’s book. My grandfather had a 6th grade education but was among the most intellectual and well-read people I ever met. As a child during the Irish Civil War, he ran across enemy lines to deliver messages to the Irish Republican Army fighting the Provisional Government over the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Following the war—as before it—he and his family struggled to survive in the urban slums, and it was no surprise that he would follow in the footsteps of millions of his countrymen and women and take the boat to America. He arrived in New York City at age sixteen in 1928. His name was Jack Bray.
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