Immigration Policy: Least we forget.

[panzerfaust]

"650 Paupers arrived at Boston in the Steamship Nestoria, April 15th, from Galway, Ireland, shipped by the British Government.

Cartoonist W. A. Rogers uses the language of debates in the early 1880s over tariff policy and "the balance of trade with Great Britain" as a vehicle to criticize the British government's policy of paying for the transport of impoverished Irish to the United States.

The Irish have been one of the largest immigrant groups in American history, with Americans of Irish descent constituting today 10 times the population of Ireland. During the potato famine years of the 1840s, the Irish were by far the most numerous immigrant class arriving in the United States. Although the stream of emigration continued to flow from Ireland in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, from 1871 to 1880, the Irish totals dropped to third place with 436,871, just behind the English (the "silent" immigrants of the period) and almost 300,000 below the number of Germans..."

http://www.harpweek.com/09Cartoon/CartoonOfTheDay.asp

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Anyone here have ancestors on that, or similar, ships? Mostly people did not come to America because things were going well in their native lands: All immigrants came with a dream of the Hopey-Changey Thingy.

Sadly, some of their descendants have forgotten that dream, and have become the same demons of repression that their ancestors fled.