Prometheus 6

"When I tell people I'm undocumented, it shocks them," said Mary Brennan, a nurse's aide who has lived in the U.S. for almost 17 years. "They think of JFK or Ronald Reagan, and they can't understand how an Irish person could be illegal."

Illegal? Better if you're Irish
An estimated 30,000 undocumented immigrants who aren't Latino live a more native-born life in New York.
Gregory Rodriguez
April 8, 2007

Woodlawn, The Bronx — IMAGINE HILLARY Clinton holding up a T-shirt that read: "Legalize Mexicans." That's not going to happen, right?

Well, last month in Washington, at a rally hosted by the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform, the leading Democratic candidate for president actually did have her picture taken holding a shirt that read: "Legalize the Irish." That's the lobby's in-your-face slogan, which says a lot about the role that race (and ethnicity) plays in the debate about illegal immigration. Latino activists bend over backward trying to cloak undocumented Mexican migrants in the slogan "We are America," but their Irish counterparts don't feel similarly obliged.

There are an estimated 50,000 Irish illegal immigrants in the U.S.; 30,000 of them are thought to live in New York City. Today, this tiny corner in the northern reaches of the Bronx is perhaps the most heavily Irish-born neighborhood in New York, and advocates believe that as many as 40% of local immigrants are undocumented.

On Tuesday afternoon, I walked up Katonah Avenue, Woodlawn's main shopping street, trying to guess who was or wasn't here illegally. How about that blond woman walking with her child? Or perhaps the redhead in pink sweats? Surely the two rough-hewn construction workers enjoying a lunchtime beer at the Rambling House bar didn't have papers. Like the woman I met in California's Central Valley a few months ago who told me how odd it had been to see white people engaged in farm labor in Australia, it was a decidedly new sensation for me to suspect all the white people around me of being illegal.