More Benjamin Franklin:
…I have proved, I think, that immigration does not diminish but multiplies a nation. Every man who comes among us and takes up a piece of land becomes a citizen, and by our Constitution has a voice in elections and a share in the government of the country. It is a fact that the Irish immigrants and their children are now in possession of the government of Pennsylvania, by their majority in the Assembly, as well as a great part of the territory; and I remember well the first ship that brought them over.
–Benjamin Franklin, The Compleated Autobiography, (Mark Skousen, ed.) p. 289.
To which I’ll add this, from A Question of Character, the muckraking biography of JFK. The author was no great friend of the Kennedy clan, but he noted:
It was difficult for the Irish to climb up the socioeconomic ladder in nineteenth-century Boston. For the most part the immigrants were uprooted peasants, kept illiterate by the cruel Penal Laws of the British. Despised by the Anglo-Saxons who ruled the city for their ignorance, their rural customs, their poverty, and their Roman Catholicism, they were thought fit only for manual labor. “Even the Negro,” wrote Richard J. Whalen, ” with an accepted place as a skilled laborer, faced less discrimination than the Irishman.” They avoided the public schools — and assimilation — because of the curriculum’s Protestant bias.
–Thomas C. Reeves, A Question of Character, p. 19.
So, now my question is: to what extent are modern Mexican immigrants like or unlike the Irish of the past? Discuss.
Well, if I compare the Mexican immigrants I’ve met and the Irish kids that were friends in my childhood, I’d have to say the Mexicans tend to have a little darker complections and Mexican food is quantum leaps ahead of Irish. Other than that not much difference.