Pity the Poor Immigrant: Pat McArt's Compassionate Perspective

My mother’s uncle emigrated to Canada in the early part of the 20th century. He was in his teens.

By all accounts his family initially got a few letters from him over the years, but then it all went silent.

There were vague rumours that he had gone prospecting during the Yukon gold rush, and had died during an outbreak of the Spanish flu there around 1917.

Anyway, whatever happened him, his mother and father and his brother, my grandfather, went to their graves without knowing.

My great uncle probably died penniless, sick and is likely buried in an unmarked grave.

The contrast between himself and Michael Boyle could hardly be more different. Michael contacted me a couple of weeks back from his home in Newfoundland.

As he described himself, he left the ‘foothills of the Sperrin mountains’ in 1967 after finishing his teacher training in St Joseph’s in Belfast.

He saw an advert in The Irish News looking for a principal teacher in a school on a remote part of Newfoundland, and was intrigued by the wording: “Come to the land of the mighty moose. Weaklings need not apply.”

Anyway, as he fancied starting at the top rather than the bottom, he applied for the job, got it, and it was a start of an adventure that gave him, despite a very rocky beginning, a great life in his adopted homeland

He tells all in his recently published memoir On New Turf.

The best recommendation I can give is that it is a lovely, lyrical reflection of a Catholic/nationalist community in the six counties which is no more.

This week we have seen riots in Ballymena aimed at immigrants . A senior PSNI officer pulled no punches when describing them as ‘racist’.

Down south there has been a massive rise in in anti-immigrant sentiment on social media.

A recent shooting incident in a Carlow supermarket is a case in point. It had the keyboard warriors spewing out bile about foreigners for a couple of hours until it was disclosed that the person involved was a white Irish male.

Irish antipathy to immigrants, given our own history, really has me confused big time.

I recall John Hume humorously suggesting one day that if I chose to go to the moon, I would find a wee Irishman sitting at a bar there having a Guinness.

He was talking in the context of the Irish diaspora, with somewhere in the region of 35 million Americans alone claiming they were of Irish descent.

So, let me quote you the following condemnation of immigrants: “We are being overwhelmed as never before by migrants. Their sheer numbers and the costs of housing and feeding them has triggered an unprecedented crisis. Everywhere one looks, it seems lazy newcomers congregate on street corners, in parks, and in front of shelters.

“They appear to have no plan and no energy to form one. Rather than support themselves, they beg or steal or seek charity and government handouts. Many say that the country they know and love will be destroyed unless the border is somehow sealed or the migrants can be sent elsewhere.”

Anyone want to try and guess when this was written? Here’s a clue, this was not in the London Times or The Irish Times or The Irish News in recent months.

It was an editorial in The New York Times in 1854, referring to Irish immigrants.

And how much has changed in the land of the free and the home of the brave almost two centuries later?

I have been watching coverage of some of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in California on CNN, and they smack totally of Nazi Germany.

Heavily armed goons with face-masks and no identification are randomly lifting people off the streets without any legal protections or due process.

ICE is targeting in particular people with brown skin, but if you are undocumented Irish involved in a road traffic incident you can take it as read if police are involved that your next accommodation is a deportation detention centre.

Oddly, I had thought all of America would be outraged by this thuggery, but apparently not.

According to a contributor to a radio show I was listening to the other morning, not only has Trump got the political cover for his fascism but has popular support amongst what was loosely described as ‘the redneck-type voter’.

By all accounts, there are a lot of them.

However, the tide might already be turning. The folk singer Joan Baez who, along with Bob Dylan, probably did more for civil rights in 1960s America than any politician – with the honourable exception of John Fitzgerald Kennedy – has come out of semi-retirement this week to blast what’s happening to American democracy.

She is capable of lighting a few fires, so her words are worth repeating: “In these terrible times I have felt as paralyzed, frustrated, outraged, and heartbroken as anyone reading this. We of like mind long for ways to be effective against tyranny. In my travels what I hear most is, ‘I am overwhelmed. What can I do?’

“It is hard to grasp the US administration’s obsession with deportation, and its cruelty towards our immigrant communities, including the flagrant violation of so many innocent hard-working people’s constitutional rights.”

Baez says she’s going to be active in the coming weeks asking people around the globe to come out in support of civil rights and urging people to get involved with various organisations which she intends to promote, which will be fighting Trump’s and other countries’ far-right policies.

Against this background, I’ll leave you with the famous words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

So, can I suggest if we really do believe in civil rights, in fairness, in democracy, in the rule of law… silence is no longer an option.

We should all be joining Joan Baez and making our voices heard.

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