What New York’s First Migrant Crisis Can Teach Us About Immigration Today

St. Patrick’s Cathedral, NYC

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Tyler Anbinder for Newsweek has an interesting comparison of the migrant “crisis” of the mid-1800s in New York City, which has been in the news with a modern migrant “crisis.”

Some New York City leaders said that the city was being “overwhelmed” by migrants. It was said that “Their sheer numbers, and the costs of housing and feeding them, has triggered an unprecedented crisis. . . . Many say that the New York they know and love will be `destroyed’ unless the border is somehow sealed or the migrants can be sent elsewhere.”

The time:  New York in 1854, after hundreds of thousands of refugees from Ireland’s Great Famine flooded into New York City.  “As a result, in 10 years, New York’s population nearly doubled. While today’s “migrants” make up no more than 2% of the city’s population, in 1855 one out of every four New Yorkers was an Irish Famine refugee.”

Some lessons from the migrant “crisis” of 1854:

1.  “First, don’t believe the doomsday predictions. “

2.  “Second, don’t be duped by the fallacy that today’s migrants aren’t `waiting in line’ to get a visa to immigrate to the U.S. like previous generations did. In truth, very few native-born Americans today have ancestors who waited in such a line. “

3.  “Third, it is important not to interfere with the migrants’ desire to cultivate and foster their own self-help networks. “

4.  “Finally, we need to let the migrants work. Tens of thousands of Irish Famine migrants initially became dependent on charities and the government for food and shelter. Yet the Irish migrants quickly became self-supporting because, like all immigrant groups before and since, they worked incredibly hard. “

Food for thought.

KJ