Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Be grateful that you aren’t coming to our house for my experiment in making corned beef and cabbage.
Let’s consider “How the Irish Could Still Save Civilization” (nytimes):
… how did Ireland’s prime minister, Leo Varadkar, the gay son of a Hindu father of Indian descent, merit time from a president who has stirred up a thousand little hatreds from the darkest corners of America?
no one in power has betrayed the Irish-American story more than President Trump.
the prime minister of a tiny nation tried to nudge the mighty United States back to the moral high ground.
We’re stuck with Trump, the most un-American of presidents, who never misses a chance to stoke xenophobic fears. In trying to erase our history, his administration recently removed the phrase “America’s promise as a nation of immigrants” from the federal agency dealing with immigrants.
Should we adopt enlightened Irish policies, then? We want to recapture the moral high ground, right? (definitely don’t want to challenge the assumption that we did formerly occupy the “moral high ground”; there is no need to justify an assertion that, prior to Trump, we were superior to almost all other nations!)
The NYT would suggest that we adopt the all-in Irish corporate tax rate of 12.5 percent (about half of the new federal+state rates in the U.S.)?
And we would eliminate the right to citizenship for kids born in the U.S. if their parents are not citizens? (“over the period 2003 to 2005, Ireland’s citizenship laws were fundamentally changed to eliminate an Irish-born child’s automatic right to citizenship when the parents are not Irish nationals.”; migrationpolicy.org) There would be no more anchor babies!
We would reject 90 percent of asylum-seekers? (“Asylum seekers are now believed to be avoiding Ireland since anti-immigration measures began to be introduced in the wake of the 2002 influx of 12,000 asylum seekers, the highest annual number of immigrants in the State’s history.”; source)
The reader comments are interesting. Pretty much everyone seems to assume that Ireland can teach the U.S. how to be friendly to immigrants. One deplorable got through with “times change. The boat is filling up. At what point do we stop taking on new passengers and risk capsizing? In roughly the last 75 years, the world population (and America’s) has increased nearly 3 times.”
When a quick Google search reveals that Ireland has much more restrictive immigration and citizenship policies than the U.S. (as well as a much higher GDP per capita! Imagine how rich they could be if they took American Democrats’ advice to expand low-skill immigration!), how does a scolding op-ed like this get past the editors of the NYT? How do the readers, all of whom have access to Google, also fail to notice that Irish policies would shut down most of the folks currently getting U.S. citizenship?
Apparently we should also make abortion illegal, like it is in Ireland.
Are you assuming someone fact checked the article. Care to explain why such optimistic outlook?
Irish tips for a proper St Patty’s:
– corned beef needs to be low simmered for hours until tender, otherwise it’s as tough as leather
– beef+cabbage must be served with mashed potatoes dyed with green food color
– unhappy with bland taste of beef+cabbage+mashed? keep drinking Guinness until taste is irrelevant
I’m not sure how Trump can have betrayed Irish-American anything since he is German-American and Scottish-American.
Ireland went from being one of the poorest nations in Western Europe to one of the richest, with higher GDP per capita than the US, so yes, we should definitely look at what they are doing right. The US has no monopoly on good ideas, and if we are to keep up with China we must confront not-invented-here syndrome (specially in health-care and education) and break up entrenched special interests.
Fazal: The unstated assumption behind the NYT article is that the goal is not to be rich, but to be virtuous. We are to emulate the Irish because they are currently more virtuous than us, not because their GDP per capita is higher. But I can’t figure out how they are more virtuous, especially with respect to the immigration issue that is the focus of the article. Ireland is less densely populated than the parts of the U.S. into which migrants settle (don’t think too many end up in Alaska or Wyoming!), yet Ireland is much less welcoming to migrants of all kinds except, perhaps, high-skill immigrants or temp workers.
I’m a US expat in Ireland, with close friends who are in the unskilled-from-Libya pile being assisted by social services, so I can perhaps bring a personal perspective.
The laws here do make it enormously easier for residents to obtain citizenship. It’s true that being born in Ireland does not automatically grant citizenship. But if you hang out for a year or two it effectively does follow. The main difference I see is not in the law per se though. Laws are subject to interpretation and discretion. The immigration officers and Garda applying and implementing the laws are enormously more rational and flexible and kind. They don’t generally stand on technicalities. They tend to go with the spirit of the law, and they usually try to make things easy. They reconfigure the process every couple years to try to avoid long lines and other inconvenience. Basically, they’re not Nazi assholes.
Barak: How easy would it be for a low-skill migrant, though? He or she has been living on welfare in Ireland since arrival, or perhaps working at a minimum wage job. Would the immigration folks hand out an Irish passport readily to this person and any children he or she has? Do the parents and other relatives of the new Irish citizen get the automatic right to residency, means-tested public housing, taxpayer-funded health care?
I wish Trump would have the sense to reduce this to a tweet and let it fly:
Donald J. Trump 1hr
@realDonaldTrump
NYTimes said we should be like Ireland today. Ireland has a 12.5% corporate tax rate. Ireland rejects birthplace citizenship. Ireland rejects 90% of immigrants. Thank you NYTimes for coming to your senses and endorsing these reasonable policies.
@philg: I’m not an expert on the twists and turns of it. But as far as I’ve seen, basically yes: if an unskilled immigrant is in Ireland as a refugee or something like that, and has kids, and hangs for a couple years, then they’re welcomed into the system and given social assistance, which includes a reasonable place to live (like in a B&B) until council housing becomes available at which point they’re basically given title to a house. Irish passports for the Irish-born (or raised) kids after a couple years, and to the parents after roughly five years of continuous legal residence. Health care, enough money to eat and maybe a new iPhone every couple years, yes to all that. I’ve never heard of a minor child being legally allowed to remain but their not-in-jail parent or other guardian being required to leave. I can scarcely imagine the outpouring of front-page newspaper stories and outraged letters-to-the-editor something like that would engender, they might even have to schedule extra bus service so people could travel more conveniently to the protests.
The job of the NYT is to sell newspapers and their readers like this sort of thing because it confirms their view of the world – that Trump and the deplorables are manifestly evil and that the US would be a better place if we emulated kinder gentler countries like Ireland or Sweden or wherever and were all “social democrats.” What is odd is to expect that the NYT would present a fair view of the world that might alienate their readers. Of course the WSJ is not so different — take a look at the bizarre conspiracy theories in the comments section of any article remotely dealing with Hillary or Mueller.
Know what else Ireland (and England and Germany and Italy etc) have? School vouchers.
Well, as a Canadian-Irish resident in Ireland, I can tell you a couple of things. Most people dislike Fine Gael and the neo-liberal weasel Leo Varadkar. They were voted out in the last election but the second big party Fianna Fail, cut a deal which left them still in charge. While US multinationals love the tax policy, most working Irish aren’t so keen as their pay and benefits are low compared to the continent. We are the white Mexico.
Abortion is up for review as there is a major move to repeal the 8th Amendment. Apparently, the Catholic practice of locking up single women for slave labour and burying their children in septic tanks has taken the lustre off of their moral arguments. Immigration is restricted and that has popular support. The priority is to make it possible for Irish children who left for places like Australia to be able to come home and find work. The influx of Eastern European and African immigrants in the past who don’t assimilate hasn’t made many fans for open immigration.
Lastly, corned beef and cabbage is a Irish American tradition as no one here eats the stuff (though I spent enough time around Jewish deli’s on the east coast to appreciate it). Le Meas, Regards, Jamie Ross, County Clare