US immigration reform is a toxic subject most politicians avoid in an election year, and the Irish claim for special treatment is bitterly divisive, writes Kathy Sheridan.
There will be no Christmas miracle for America's illegals. That much is evident to anyone who has visited the US in recent months.
The collapse, in June, of a major immigration reform bill, over which Ted Kennedy and John McCain had laboured for years, has left millions stranded in the shadowlands of the American Dream. And the chances of retrieving the situation? Well, you need only to understand the term "the third rail".
This is the railway track that carries the exposed, high voltage, electrical conductor, one so highly charged that anyone who steps on it will probably die. Hence its common use as a metaphor for "untouchable" subjects in US politics. Traditional "third rail" issues include ending support for Israel, raising taxes and legalising drugs.
So when the Democrats' chief strategist in the presidential campaign describes immigration as the "latest third rail of American politics", you know it's time for the undocumented to hit the bunkers. For aspiring presidents on the "wrong" side of the argument, illegal immigrants spell political death.
How or why the debate became so toxic is a mystery to many. According to a New York Times poll in May, 62 per cent backed the notion that anyone in the US for at least two years should be allowed a (fairly onerous) shot at legal status, while only one-third felt they should be deported. Yet that minority is the one that has managed to convulse the airwaves, with apoplectic propagandists such as the CNN host, Lou Dobbs, giving it wings from his nightly pulpit.
One after another, stunned candidates are talking about a tsunami of fury crashing across the US around immigration.
McCain, Mike Huckabee and Hillary Clinton all admit that the big surprise of the campaign has been the scorching intensity of the issue. "I honestly don't know why it's gotten so hot," said Huckabee, the current Republican darling. Clinton noted that during the 1990s, she couldn't remember even being asked about immigration.
So she "did a Hillary": she tried to fudge. She walked straight into the crossfire by executing a disastrous flip-flop on a proposal to issue drivers' licences to illegals in her constituency of New York state, tying herself in knots by first appearing to be in favour, then against.
By contrast, leading Republican candidates, such as former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, men with humane track records on immigration, sniffed the wind. They're now pandering hard to the anti-immigrant vote.
Amid all this, an opinion column by Trina Vargo, founder and president of the US-Ireland Alliance, was carried in this paper in mid-November. Her argument - that in the current conditions, Irish illegals are not a special case, do not deserve a special deal and that such a deal would lead to a divisive debate between the Hispanic and Irish-American communities - attracted an overwhelmingly critical response.
MEANWHILE, IN THE Bronx, in a warm, modestly-furnished, rented apartment, Mícheál and Cheryl McMahon are into their 15th year as Irish illegals. The couple came over in the last pre-Celtic Tiger wave, certain only that their future did not lie in the Donegal of 1993. He was a carpenter who left school at 16 to learn his trade: "There was no Celtic Tiger. There was no work. I was on the dole. I remember I was in my apartment in Bundoran one winter night at around 11 o'clock and looking out the window and it must be that a bale of hay fell off a truck but it was like something you'd see in a Western, hay blowing down an empty street and it was like a sign from God . . ." He was 20. Young, unmarried and mobile, the couple got three-month US visas: "We didn't know whether we were going to like it. We might have been back." The nature of the farewells suggested otherwise. "There was a big party, a kind of American wake". His father, Mick, was too upset to get out of bed and say goodbye when they left for the airport.
After a few months living with a family friend from Pettigo, Co Donegal, Mícheál got a job as a labourer. "I began to like it. I joined up with the Fermanagh team. You made friends and it became a home away from home - playing in Gaelic Park on a Sunday, with a barbecue, the band playing, the lovely summer weather." Cheryl got a "good job" as a nanny on the Upper East Side, working 14-hour days from 7am. Mícheál moved up from labourer to carpenter. "Then they took me into the office and trained me, paid for my engineering classes at night school. Now I'm senior project manager. That would never have happened in Ireland. It was them pushing me".
For the first few years, everyone was visiting them and their status didn't worry them. But when a lottery visa scheme came up, they applied for it through a sponsor. Meanwhile, around Christmas 2000, they had decided they wanted to get married at home in Donegal. Everything was going smoothly. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) - now the US Citizenship and Immigration Services - had indicated by letter that they would be approved. Mícheál checked the wedding dates with his lawyer to ensure that their case would not be harmed by leaving the country at that time. They were told to go ahead, but that turned out to be bad advice. "Because of that, I went home one day before I should have so I wasn't able to prove that I was in the country on that particular date". The McMahons were snookered.
Then came 9/11. "That put everyone back at the bottom of the pile." They've had two children since then, Mícheál junior and Íosa, and both are entitled to American passports. But the parents are legal ghosts and, for an outsider, the complexity of each particular case is difficult to fathom. After 9/11, he says, the crackdown on companies employing illegal immigrants made it too risky for many. "After a second offence, they can close a company down." Although he had paid taxes for 10 years, he never got a social insurance number. Others who came out before 9/11 were luckier, he says: "They managed to get into a union and are paying taxes". Without a number, the system is effectively closed.
They cannot get a mortgage, so they will always be renting. He cannot travel internally or get a driver's licence. "There is always the danger now of being picked up. I don't travel inside America; I never leave the Bronx. For vacation, we go to Manhattan [ a 30-minute train ride] for a week and stay in a hotel in Times Square".
And of course there is no question of a visit to Ireland.
Apart from the wedding trip, only Cheryl has been home in 14 years, for her father's funeral. "That was a massive risk", she says. "I wasn't stopped but that's the luck of the draw". In the meantime, a grandmother has died; a sister got married; Mícheál's youngest sister - seven months old when he left - has grown into her teens without getting to know her only brother. Next year, his parents will celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary. For Cheryl's parents, Mícheál junior and Íosa are their only grandchildren. The separation cuts deep. "It's no life really," he concedes.
Yet, it seems, there is no going back.
"There was no boom when I was there. No matter how bad things are in New York, there's always work, you can always be a delivery boy. I've made a new life here, I've got two American kids. I don't think there is anyone more deserving. I've spent a third of my life here. How long is the boom going to last in the north of Ireland? What would Ireland do if 25,000 people arrived back there next week ? Is Ireland willing to pay for my kids to go to school, for healthcare? Will it have a house for me and a job ? I don't think so."
He sees the obvious disconnect between his case and the fact that so many others like him returned home during the boom that New York's GAA is struggling to assemble teams. "When we came over, there were 16 hurling teams, now there are only four. A lot went home when the [ immigration reform] bill failed in the American congress. But a lot have decided to come back again. I know two bricklayers who were legal and who went home but are back again because the work is not there for them. Another family moved back [ to Ireland] for 18 months and hated it. They couldn't afford to live the sort of life they had here. They hadn't the same freedom at all." The younger elements of the diaspora can be surprisingly unsentimental about the oul' sod.
MÍCHEÁL PRIDES HIMSELF on the fact that he has "never, ever claimed anything off the state". Their private health insurance costs $245 (€167) a month. Mícheál junior's kindergarten is $5,000 (€3,415) a year: "He won't be a burden on the state, even though he's totally entitled to it", says Mícheál firmly. "My dream is of the day when I can call myself a legal citizen of New York and walk in and pay my taxes."
In that case, they're stuck hard, in a climate as hostile to immigrants as the US has ever seen. "I've never been in trouble a day in my life. But I can't apply for legalisation. I entered this country illegally and that's it."
It's time the Irish Government did something, he says. "My brother came through Shannon and said it's like an American army base. How many other countries are doing that? Yet Bertie Ahern can't just call George Bush . . . The action group at home have met politicians such as Ahern and Eamon Ryan but it's always the same thing: 'This is a complex issue.' I thought governments were meant to deal with complex issues." Cheryl interjects gently: "It is complex. This isn't only about the Irish."
Which is where Vargo came in. And the problem for Mícheál and Cheryl is that Vargo is merely reflecting reality, as seen from Washington. The extent and nature of media coverage suggests that the Irish are among the main victims of the 9/11 crackdown. In fact, the Irish are an infinitesimal minority in a vast and complex picture. Of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the US, almost 80 per cent are Mexican or from elsewhere in Latin America. Only 6 per cent come from Europe or Canada. Depending on who is rolling out the statistics, the figure for long-term Irish illegals is said to be somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000, or even fewer if the NYT figure is correct.
Yet, as a lengthy article in that paper noted in March 2006, the Irish, as always, managed to land centre stage. For months before that, coalitions of Latino, Asian and African immigrants from 50 countries had been championing the proposed Senate legislation that would allow them to work legally towards citizenship, rather than punishing them with prison. Yet, when Democrat Senator Charles E Schumer first spoke out on immigration, it was at an Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform (ILIR) event in Queens, having declined invitations from veteran immigrant organisations "more representative of an estimated 700,000 illegal immigrants in the state".
A few weeks later, when Senators Schumer and Clinton wanted to declare their support for the new path to citizenships for immigrants, they chose to do so not at the 40,000-strong, mostly Hispanic immigrant march on Washington, but at the much smaller ILIR rally of 2,400 the following day.
Some admired the lobbying clout and chutzpah of the Irish. Others however, betrayed a decided weariness. A sense that white and European are the preferred colour and origin for the Washington political elite had taken root. Activists began to talk about "a civil rights struggle", about "immigrants of colour" not being important enough for those senators to make a space in their calendar.
ONE IMMIGRATION HISTORIAN, Roger Daniels, referred to the Irish track record of lobbying triumphs - such as the creation of special visas in the 1980s and 1990s - as "affirmative action for white Europeans". "Mainly, though," reported the NYT, "[ the immigrant coalitions] marvel at the bipartisan muscle and positive spin the illegal Irish can muster, even as their numbers dwindle to perhaps 25,000 to 50,000 across the country - those left behind by a tide of return migration to a now-prosperous Ireland".
Niall O'Dowd, chairman of the ILIR, countered that it was not about civil rights at all. "It's about how you change the law," he said, adding that for years, he had lobbied to win nearly lost causes, including helping to broker a ceasefire in Northern Ireland. "It's not about being fair, it's about being good. It's about getting it done."
In a scathing critique of Vargo's position, he argued that in the current toxic atmosphere, a bilateral deal (ie a special deal between the US and Ireland) is the only way. Why shouldn't the Irish pursue "creative" ways to settle their own difficulties? "Far from preventing others immigrate, a bilateral deal may well show how the issue of undocumented can be dealt with in a creative way by different countries". In other words, if the Irish can do it for themselves, so can the Hispanics, Africans and Asians.
And what is the special Irish argument? Former congressman Bruce Morrison, author of the Morrison visa legislation and a consultant to the ILIR, contends it is "deeply important" for Ireland to continue to have a footprint in the US: "the Irish-American diaspora in the US has been replenished over the past two centuries by repeated waves of arrivals. One generation of the Celtic Tiger does not damage those fundamentals."
THIS WEEK, VARGO was unrepentant. Asked by The Irish Times where the spur for her article came from, her number one point was : "These individuals have broken the laws of the US." She continued : "Even if you believe, as I do, that the immigration issue has to be resolved by legalisation (for practical reasons), then you have to consider why the Irish should be singled out above all others. I've yet to hear a single reasonable argument as to why that should occur . . . Is an American politician really going to alienate millions of Latinos to help maybe 5,000 or 10,000 illegal Irish? . . . What would they gain that is so great as to outweigh that grief?"
And all of this, she argues, has an impact on how others look at the Irish and Irish America. "I am based in Washington DC and interact with a wide range of people, not just the Irish, and when this subject is raised, people are generally appalled that anyone would argue for putting the Irish at the head of the line." She claims that 95 per cent of an "overwhelming" number of responses to her piece supported her view. "Many I heard from were prominent individuals in both the US and Ireland, names you would know." They would have to decide for themselves as to whether they want to make their views known, she added.
Meanwhile, Irish-American papers carry bubbly features on the Christmas shopping invasion by the Irish ("buying 10 pairs of shoes and two apartments in a weekend," jibes one Irish New Yorker). Macy's department store declares that we are almost equal to the British in the cash splash stakes. The New York canyons resound with visiting Irish accents laden down with wheelie bags. Those attempting to convince even the best-disposed Americans that Irish illegals are fleeing hardship, and not making a simple lifestyle choice, will find it a hard sell.