At this St. Patrick’s Day, as rivers are dyed green and Blarney infests the airwaves, one could be fooled into thinking that the Irish-American community is as robust as ever. But a series of changes to US immigration rules has largely closed the door to new entries, leading inexorably to a “graying” of Irish America. This began with the 1965 Immigration Act, which ended the quota system that had benefited mostly white Europeans in favor of a fairer family reunification policy that helped boost immigration from developing nations. Most would-be Irish immigrants did not have near-enough relatives already in the US to petition for them. But if legal immigration was blocked, there were still many willing to take their chances by overstaying a student or tourist visa. The recession that paralyzed Ireland’s economy in the 1980s propelled around 150,000 undocumented Irish to America. Many landed in New York.
For some, the gamble paid off. An extraordinary effort led by the grassroots Irish Immigration Reform Movement (IIRM) to “Legalize the Irish” ensued, and through sheer determination and a bit of luck, it prevailed. By the mid-1980s, there were already 2–3 million unauthorized immigrants from various countries living in the US. In a bipartisan bid to deal with the growing crisis, Congress passed the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized any immigrant of “good moral character” who had been living in the US continuously since 1982.
Most of the young Irish had arrived too late to take advantage of this amnesty, but with the help of a few Democratic politicians—Brian J. Donnelly, Howard L. Berman, and later, Bruce Morrison—they became eligible to apply for visas on a first-come, first-serve basis in what eventually became the Green Card lottery. Of the first 40,000 visas made available to all of the countries “adversely affected by the 1965 Act,” the Irish won 40 percent. Paul Finnegan, the executive director of the New York Irish Center, who was part of the IIRM reform effort, recalled attending Donnelly visa parties at which volunteers would help undocumented hopefuls each fill in hundreds of applications (to increase their chances) and then charter buses so the forms could be delivered as close as possible to the central processing center.
Despite the success of the Donnelly drive, the 16,000 or so visas awarded to Irish applicants came nowhere near fulfilling demand. Another lottery sponsored by Berman followed in 1989, and then came the Morrison program, which allocated 50,000 visas for the Irish to be awarded over three different years in the 1990s. “By that point,” Finnegan told me, “anyone in the Irish community who was engaged would have gotten legalized.”