Grubbs 1 Nicholas Grubbs Ms. Whipple, Ms.

Kelley English, History 2/6/2013 The Fighting Irish Over the course of a ten year period, well over a million Irish immigrants came to the United States. Some of the push factors that affected Ireland were the need for more political power, and extreme poverty. They were under the rule of Queen Victoria in the United Kingdom and were given little say in their own government. The potato famine, a blight which destroyed the entirety of their crop, the mainstay of their subsistence, had killed more than a million people. Unemployment was high in Ireland and the United States, undergoing tremendous growth, had higher paying jobs. Some pull factors were that because of the potato famine millions of Irish people had already immigrated to America. That meant that almost everyone in Ireland already knew someone in America. The Irish generally stayed near the coastline, in cities like New York and Boston because they didnt have the money to travel to far away from where their boat landed. They had also formed tight-knit communities with their own neighborhoods and churches. Even though many Irish struggled to find work, there were jobs in America that didnt yet exist

Grubbs 2 in Ireland--building canals, railroads, streets and sewers, as the cities burgeoned with huge population growth on the verge on the Industrial Revolution. Despite the tremendous challenges of a long arduous journey, a lack of resources, a new country and a new language, the Irish, in huge numbers, chose to take that risk to enjoy political freedom and economic opportunity. By the time the great swell of Irish landed in the U.S., the Americans no longer welcomed the Irish immigrants. They thought that the immigrants ruined job opportunities for the natural born American. In the 1920s the open door policy starts to close down on immigration through a quota system. There was a backlash against the Irish as jobs became scarce. Slums rose in the large cities from the unemployment and the Irish got the reputation of hard-drinking, neer-do-wells, whether deserved or not. Some recurring themes in these passages is the desire to return home or the fear and loss in leaving their home country. In all of the passages they do not want to leave Ireland or want to stay in America. Another recurring theme is the theme of death in their writing. They all talk about a relative or a friend that has passed for different reasons. Hunger and disease were so rampant, many felt that they had no choice, but to leave their homeland. In all three passages they talk about nature. Many of the Irish had been living on lush green farmland and were forced to live in the dirtiest of city living condition in the Northeast. They yearn for the grass and open land. Despite the tragedy and difficulty of their circumstance, their writings talk of love, nature, friends and family.

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"HERB: Resources for Teachers | An Immigrant Writes a Letter Home to Ireland." Omeka RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Feb. 2013. http://herb.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/717 "Irish Emigration." Irish Emigration. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Feb. 2013. http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~irelandlist/emmi.html "Irish Immigration Facts." Irish Immigration Facts. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Feb. 2013 http://www.udel.edu/soe/deal/IrishImmigrationFacts.html "Lament of the Irish Emigrant." Helen Selina, Lady Dufferin:. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Feb. 2013 http://www.daypoems.net/poems/643.html "Salem Press." Salem Press. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Feb. 2013. http://salempress.com/store/samples/us_immigration_history/us_immigration_history_history .htm