Dear Immigrants: Ryan and Company

Dear Republican Immigrants:

No, not the newly despised, the formerly despised. YOU. All of you recovered immigrants.

Paul Ryan, remember when your Irish family came to these shores? Remember when they were starving in Ireland? Literally. Dying of malnutrition. Watching their children die. Of starvation.

Paul, I don't know your ancestry, of course, but if you have anything in common with other Irish immigrants... Did you just spring up in Janesville with a beautiful home in the Courthouse District. I doubt it. Even if you did, most of your fellow Irish did not.

Did you know that your kith and kin from Ireland came here in something very similar to slave ships? Called coffin ships. They were packed together in their own excrement with barely enough food to make it. Well, really, they often didn't. Just like slave ships.

Did you know that your ancestors were not considered "White?" The Irish were considered a minority race.

They were unwelcome and they faced a solid wall of discrimination. Businesses boldly put up signs: "No Irish Need Apply."

Your Irish family was dirt poor. They had to work at any form of job or hustle that they could get. 

Did your family come straight to the Midwest? Did they live in a single room (maybe even 10 ft. x 10 ft.) in a tenement in Chicago or Milwaukee first? All of them. Parents and children. Procreating, giving birth, wasting away, and dying all together in one room.

Without running water, ventilation, windows, electricity, or toilets perhaps? 

Remember when WASP's just despised the Irish? Wasn't one of those horrid diseases called "Irish Fever?" Oh, yes. Typhus. 

Notice how we associate contagious illness with the people who suffer the most from it? HIV in recent years. Typhus? Smallpox? Spreading wildly in tenements by.. What?  British Isles and European immigrants? 


They were dying of malnutrition or the contagious diseases of cramped squalid conditions: Poverty -> squalid conditions -> malnutrition -> poor health -> agonizing lives and deaths. And, oh, yeah,  being despised as lazy drunken people with too many children.

Oh, yeah! Almost forgot. The WASPS who got here first just hated you Catholic Irish. Hated drinking. Hated your large families. Hated your poverty and illness and squalor. Hated your religion. Hmmm... something like hating Islam?

Now, we would be shocked by those cruel attitudes  toward the Irish or the German or the ... well any of those former "good" immigrants.

And, I am shocked and enraged when people who belong to formerly despised immigrant groups blame people for their own lot in life.

Haven't you learned anything from being here?

You did clearly not get enough love when you were growing up. I am so so so sorry. Because people who did not get enough love grow up empty and lacking in compassion.

There is love enough. You can spare some for the current crop of despised newcomers.

Love, VLL


"From 1820 to 1860, 1,956,557 Irish arrived, 75% of these after the Great Irish Famine (or The Great Hunger, Irish: An Gorta Mór) of 1845–1852, struck. Of the total Irish immigrants to the U.S. from 1820 to 1860, many died crossing the ocean due to disease and dismal conditions of what became known as coffin ships." Wikipedia

http://www.history.com/news/when-america-despised-the-irish-the-19th-centurys-refugee-crisis

I highly recommend this book:
https://bookspics.com/ebooks/flesh-and-blood-a-history-of-my-family-in-seven-maladies/