Cue the mournful fiddle music please, and nod sadly as I tell you that when I was a child in Ireland, I stood often upon the shore and squinted across the Atlantic, dreaming of moving to New York City. And now bring in the beat of a bodhrán, our traditional wood-framed drum covered tight in goatskin, to signify with growing excitement, triumph even, that I made my dream come true.
See me now, whirling around this city that never sleeps, bursting with that feeling you get only when ambition meets opportunity. Voices sing out: “Look at this good immigrant!”
But wait, cut the music, this is all a bit much. My journey was not fraught. There was no huge obstacle to overcome, no great fortress to penetrate. At seventeen, in that smooth “I-want-it-so-I’ll-take-it” way of a middle-class white person, I simply moved here.
I got a job as an au pair with an Irish family in Rye, a small and comfortable New York town. I did not even need to apply for a visa, the mother of the family explained; as an Irish citizen, I was covered by the Visa Waiver Program, which allows citizens of specific countries to travel to the United States for up to ninety days without having to obtain a visa. I could just stroll up to the American immigration agent at Dublin airport and show him my visa waiver.
As an Irish person, I enjoyed “preclearance” from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. It’s a nice feature, available to travelers from a small number of countries. Of course, it’s calamitous if you need to claim asylum in America, because you can do so only on U.S. soil, and without the correct papers you won’t get past preclearance in Ireland, but I never had to worry about that.
I also didn’t worry about overstaying my ninety-day visa waiver. I simply overstayed, slipping contentedly into undocumented status. Most undocumented immigrants in America have done something similar. We arrive by plane, either with a visa, or a visa waiver, and then we just . . . stay. Some two-thirds of the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants in America were once legal, until their visas or waivers expired.
That’s one reason I cringe at calls to spend billions on a border wall with Mexico when, according to a 2016 Department of Homeland Security report, the number of people managing to make it illegally through the southern border with Mexico dropped from 1.7 million in 2005 to 170,000 in 2015. Oh, and there’s the fact that more Mexican people are leaving the United States to go back to Mexico than vice versa.
Trump’s Travel Ban 3.0, rejecting people from Iran, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, and Chad, is now the law of the land, having been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. This one is illogical too, given that relatively few immigrants from those countries have made it here in the first place. Illogical, that is, unless the logic you’re working off is “Let’s make sure all the brown people know they’re not wanted here.”
This is not new. Throughout its history, the United States has taken a racialized approach to immigration and naturalization laws. Between 1790 and 1802, Congress passed a series of naturalization laws, mandating “five years’ residence in the country, ‘good moral character,’ and that applicants be ‘free white persons,’ ” according to a 2002 report by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services historian. “U.S. nationality law generally transformed northern and western European immigrants into U.S. citizens.”
Non-European immigrants were less fortunate, many finding it impossible to even get here in the first place. There was the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which remained in various iterations until World War II, when it became a little too awkward to discriminate against our new allies, the Chinese.
The Johnson-Reed Act was passed in 1924 “to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity,” according to the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State. It limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota and completely excluded Asian immigrants. Immigration and naturalization laws changed during the 1940s and 1950s, ostensibly to be more fair to Asian immigrants, but the changes amounted only to mere tweaks to the 1924 system while maintaining the quota policy.
As a result of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, 85 percent of the 154,277 visas available annually went immediately to immigrants of northern and western European lineage. It makes me think of our current President, bubbling up with a rage-filled longing for more Norwegians.
The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act eliminated the use of national-origin quotas and committed the United States, for the first time, to accepting immigrants of all nationalities on a roughly equal basis. The following years saw an increase in Asian and Latino immigrants, and a decline in Irish. But as a brutal recession ground on in the old country, thousands of Irish people did not wait for a legal path in; they came to the United States as tourists, and simply stayed.
Irish American politicians tried to figure out what to do with them, and in 1986 they came up with what was called a Donnelly Visa. Ostensibly a diversity program lottery, it was quite openly a way to help those undocumented Irish regularize their status. U.S. Representative Brian J. Donnelly, Democrat of Massachusetts, oversaw the first phase of the program, under which 4,161 out of the first 10,000 visas went to the Irish. They used a loophole that allowed them to enter the lottery multiple times, even holding parties to fill out multiple applications on behalf of one of their own.
In 1989, the diversity program became a truly random lottery, with only one entry per person, and the Irish received only 1 percent of the visas. The top three recipient countries were Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Egypt. A new program a year later again favored European countries. Known as Morrison Visas after their sponsor, U.S. Representative Bruce Morrison, Democrat of Connecticut, these were distributed over the next three years to immigrants from countries disadvantaged by the 1965 Immigration Act. More than 40 percent went to Irish citizens.
In 1995, the diversity visa lottery we have today began allowing 50,000 people into the United States each year from countries with “historically low" rates of immigration.
In 1995, this became the diversity visa lottery we have today, the one that allows 50,000 people into the United States each year from countries with “historically low rates of immigration to the United States,” according to the State Department. It’s a program the current administration is now looking to axe, with the President regularly deriding it.
Vice President Mike Pence, who once tried to ban Syrian refugees from Indiana, often lauds his Irish grandfather’s immigrant story. The grandfather, Richard Cawley, left Ireland in 1923, escaping a vicious civil war. Under rules in place at the time, Cawley would not have been allowed into the country had he been Chinese, and likely would not have been able to get the job he did, as a streetcar driver, had he been black. And yet The New York Times quotes Pence addressing a group of Latino business leaders in March 2017, saying “If you work hard, play by the rules, anybody can be anybody in America.”
Today an estimated 15,000 undocumented Irish people live in the United States. In March 2017, during the traditional St. Patrick’s Day celebrations at the White House, a usually good-natured affair, then-Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny struck a serious note, “There are millions out there who want to play their part for America—if you like, who want to make America great.”
Kenny’s message fell on deaf ears; in the first year of his presidency, Trump revoked the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, leaving up to 800,000 people at risk of returning to undocumented status. His administration also ended Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Sudan. And he plans to cut legal immigration in half within a decade.
After six months of washing bed sheets for $150 a week, and wandering around the city on my days off, not thinking twice about asking cops for directions, I didn’t want to be an au pair anymore. I returned to Ireland. There were no consequences for my overstay.
A few years later, I got a student J-1 visa and returned to New York, waitressing and babysitting for the summer. In 2013, I was granted a P3 visa as an artist coming to contribute in a culturally unique way. I told jokes at a comedy festival in Kansas City, and applied for an O-1 visa, which means I am “an alien of extraordinary ability.” It was granted.
But I can’t help feeling I’m not extraordinary at all. It’s dumb luck that I was born white and Irish. And that luck, combined with a history of racialized immigration policies, meant that I was allowed to move here, to a country with leaders who look at me and see themselves, and welcome me with open arms as they push others away.
Maeve Higgins is the host of the hit podcast Maeve in America: Immigration IRL. She writes for e New York Times, and her book Maeve in America will be published by Penguin in August 2018.