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Please find me an Irish congressman addressing Irish in America in Irish about how Ireland is "we" and not "they."
Better yet, find me a German congressman who calls himself German, speaks to Germans living in America in German, about the need to keep Germany for the Germans.
Or, even better, find me a Somali in Somalia who says makes fun of Omar for pretending to be Somali. Please, demonstrate this supposed equivalence. It's not the same, it's not close to same. It's offensive to even equate the two.
The Germans were rightly discouraged from doing this. They know better. The Somalis ought to know better, too, and if it takes their brightest star being cast out of my country in disgrace for them to learn, then so much the better.
These people are foreigners, regardless of laws or citizenship, and they have no desire to assimilate.
Entirely plausible, but would almost certainly be someone from the AfD, which means he'd be either conspicuously ignored or thoroughly discredited by the German press - and I guess would go unnoticed by the American press. Do you guys notice Germany at all?
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Well the main language in Ireland is English, and Irish is not even spoken by a majority of the population there, less than 40% have "some" ability to speak it. It's highly unlikely then anyone would be addressing a full speech in Irish, not because they assimilated to the US, but because even most Irish people would not understand it! I think your requirements for something that matches her speech are way too narrow but I will give you a brief set of examples below about how strong the Irish grip on America is. The Irish lobby in the US is arguably weakening but it is still huge. And I think it is hard to say her speech is worse than the actual actions taken across decades (from your point of view).
Having said that Peter King was a congressman until 2021 and he spoke repeatedly on the idea that the IRA was legitimately trying to create a free Ireland for his people.
"Speaking at a pro-IRA rally in 1982 in Nassau County, New York, King pledged support to "those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry."
"Shouts of "Long live the King" marked the annual St Patrick's Day parade here -- cheers for Peter King, a militant supporter of the Irish Republican Army who led 200,000 marchers up Fifth Avenue. King, the financial controller of suburban Nassau County, was named grand marshal of the parade after a bitter two-month campaign. "I was elected to send a clear message to England to get out of Ireland," he said. "The IRA's violence is only a reaction to violence started by the British Government.""
He spoke to try and stop the US government deporting Irish terrorists:
"Reps. Pete King (R-L.I.) and Tom Manton (D-Queens) will lead the speeches in support of Irish political figures such as Brian Pearson, whom the Immigration and Naturalization Service wants to deport as a terrorist.
"We want to focus attention on the terrible abuse of power by the Justice Department to deport these decent men," said King, Sinn Fein's biggest cheerleader in Congress."
And here we have another congressman saying support for meeting the queen is ok because "more Irish" (implying of course that he is himself at least somewhat Irish) people support it (this his position is not determined by what is good for the US)
"Democratic Congressman Richard Neal of Massachusetts, leader of the Friends of Ireland group in Congress and a vocal supporter of the peace process, told the Irish Voice he was surprised and pleased by the gesture. “None of us are more Irish than Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and John Hume,” he said. “If they say it’s okay, it’s okay for me."
We can also add Ronald Reagan saying Ireland was "home" and talking about how he had so many Irish-Americans in his cabinet that he had to fight them off Air Force One, and that he was an Irishman himself.
"Now, of course I didn't exactly expect a chilly reception. As I look around this chamber, I know I can't claim to be a better Irishman than anyone here, but I can perhaps claim to be an Irishman longer than most any of you here."
"I think you know, though, that Ireland has been much in our thoughts since the first days in office. I'm proud to say the first Embassy I visited as President was Ireland's, and I'm proud that our administration is blessed by so many Cabinet members of Irish extraction. Indeed I had to fight them off Air Force One or there wouldn't be anyone tending the store while we're gone. And that's not to mention the number of Irish Americans who hold extremely important leadership posts today in the United States Congress."
Or the so-called "four horsemen" of the Irish-American political grouping who used their influence to lobby the UK to treat their ancestral homeland differently? Sure they didn't say exactly what you asked.. but actions speak louder than words. They didn't just give speeches, they raised money and influenced government policy.
Whatever was said about Somalia and Somalians it probably also doesn't match up to Irish-Americans raising money for a violent group dedicated to unification of Ireland. Unless you think loyalty to Ireland had nothing to do with it of course.
Thank you.
Yes, the Irish have refused integration most assiduously, making all of the complaints about their initial migration justified in retrospect. I can only hope that we have since learned our lessons, and that we do not keep making the same mistake, over and over and over.
Well....except that nowadays that doesn't appear to be the case. Most of the things I quoted are from the 80s into the 90s.
Even the various Irish lobbies are of the opinion that time has passed.
https://reason.com/volokh/2023/03/17/the-declining-political-significance-of-irish-american-identity/
And if Reagan of all people would not be considered a true American, then I fear you may be a little miscalibrated.
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Pretty sure if you went back a hundred years ago when Irish immigrants were coming to the country through Ellis Island, there were probably numerous speeches given by congressmen and government officials at places like Tammany Hall that both were about how that particular Irish leader was looking out for the Irish constituents in America but also making sure that that the USA relationship with Ireland would only grow stronger and they promised that their home island would be subject to less bullying from England because of their American leverage.
I would put huge money on that any wasp republican from that time period would say the same exact thing as you regarding those Irish and Italians. That they are foreigners, have no respect for this nation and its culture and have no real desire to assimilate.
To a large extent you're true. I think first gen immigrants have a strong attachment to their country of origin and will always be like this. You can see it in other groups like how Indians Americans were in full force when Narendra Modi visited America, ect.
I think you're overestimating though how that makes any difference in the light of time. Children who grow up in America are mostly Americanized completely. Few younger Indian Americans care much about Indian politics, I know many Ethiopians who grew up here and though they are saddened by their recent civil war, they didn't shed tears like their parents did because their attachment to Ethiopia is more of a general vague identity and cultural traditions. Not the land or even its people. My Brazilian origin ex visits her grandparents and extended family in Brazil every couple of years and has somewhat strong ties to Brazil visiting it fairly often as a child, but she isn't Brazilian. She knows Portuguese, and loves the food of her country, follows some traditions and is culturally catholic, but she's American. She's not religious, dates people from every ethnic background, her favorite cuisine is Korean and lives to watch trashy american reality tv.
America is America and people are much too busy to care that much when its not a firsthand direct connection. Now, will my exes potential grandchild go to a liberal arts college one day and become a super woke identiterian using her latino and brazilian heritage as a crutch to not have or develop a real personality? Quite possibly, but that's also a uniquely American thing too.
Eh, the Italians were relatively Republican (as were the Germans) while the Irish leaned Democratic (AFAIK there's still a decent-sized partisan gap between Americans of German or Italian ancestry and those with Irish ancestry.). It's not a coincidence that Antonin Scalia and Ron DeSantis are big Republican names while the Democrats still boast politicians like Joe Biden and Mike Duggan. The GOP of that era thought that the Great Migration (Party of Lincoln!) was going to save them from the white ethnic hordes.
I believe the Germans were mostly Democrats during the peak periods of German immigration. The liberal, largely atheistic Forty-Eighters were almost all Republicans, but they were, despite their outsized cultural influence, a tiny minority of German immigrants. The majority were conservative Catholics and Lutherans who had little use for the Republican party. The midwestern German-Americans began to warm up to the Republicans before WWI, but they didn’t switch en mass until after.
The Texas Germans voted Republican for a while IIRC, and they were conservative enough to schizophrenically larp about seceding to set up a Hapsburg monarchy.
That is interesting. Do you know what group that was? I know there were a few… attempts, if you can call it that; it would probably be more accurate to say idle day-dreams… to create a new Germany in the Midwest (every one of which fizzled out almost immediately as the immigrants realized that the USA was actually pretty great). I hadn’t heard of anything similar in Texas, but then I’m only really familiar with a couple of German communities down there.
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/adelsverein
They were successful enough that Texas had it's own dialect of German(which still has like a thousand native speakers in nursing homes in central Texas) and Fredericksburg is still a major town. Can't find a source on the monarchism RN but I swear they were planning it originally.
Thanks for the link! I’ll have to see if I can find anything on the monarchism. I’m sure it would make for a fascinating read.
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My understanding is that Catholic and "traditional" Lutheran Germans were Democrats and the pietist Lutheran and Calvinist Germans were Republicans.
You are correct, and I shouldn’t have glossed over that distinction. The pietistic German Lutherans and Reformed tended to assimilate much more quickly than their Catholic and traditional Lutheran counterparts, with many joining Methodist or Baptist churches, supporting Prohibition, opposing parochial schools, and rather quickly dropping their “hyphenated” German-American identities, in many cases anglicizing their names in the process. These were much more likely to join the Republican party prior to WWI. The German freethinkers, with their singing and athletic clubs, were even more strongly Republican.
The Republicans actually had some decent success in courting traditional Lutherans and Catholics, but they had a habit of shooting themselves in the foot every couple of years and driving those groups back to the Democrats. Prohibition was the longest-lived issue, causing friction from the 1850s until the passage of the 18th Amendment, with the Republicans typically in favor and the Democrats typically opposed. Then in 1889, Illinois and Wisconsin passed laws requiring children to attend English-speaking schools, which led to a massive backlash from the traditional German communities and concomitant electoral victories for the Democrats. (There had already been quite a few skirmishes over Bible reading and prayer in the public schools before then, which an uneasy alliance of Catholics, traditional Lutherans, and German freethinkers opposed.)
Interestingly, the Scandinavians, being mostly Pietistic, were a pretty reliable Republican vote early on, though that naturally shifted over the years as the parties changed.
In Indiana, there was an additional wrinkle in the 1920s. The Ku Klux Klan popped up in the state during WWI, then flourished massively in the early 1920s, before dying off just as quickly as it had grown. Unlike in the south, the Indiana Klan was not primarily an anti-black organization, but was anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant, and anti-Catholic, with animosity toward traditional Lutherans typically thrown in with those last two. The Klan was technically bipartisan but was more closely associated with the Republicans, which probably hampered the German vote’s transition to that party.
Very interesting post.
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In the GSS, Italians lean more heavily Democrat than the Irish and both are significantly more Democrat than Republican. In this sample, the only white categories that don't lean Democrat overall are the British, the Scandinavians and the Germans & Dutch.
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Relevantly, there were congressmen with ties to the IRA all through the troubles.
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Put up, then. If they exist, you should be able to put them in front of me, not just speculate about their existence.
If you found such a speech, by the way, my response would be that the sentiment was rightly crushed by limited immigration and forced assimilation. Before that happened they were not American in any sense. And nobody would be defending it, or saying the Irish were just as American despite their need of a hyphen.
As true then as it is today. The way to disprove such an accusation is, of course, to assimilate and interbreed, and that takes decades.
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I'm not sure it's exactly what you're asking for, but the Irish community in America raised funds and trafficked arms for the IRA for decades, and I would not be surprised if Irish-American politicians participated at least somewhat in their actions. Financing and supplying a terror campaign against one of our core allies is, with some distance, a pretty significant action.
Indeed. The movie Blown Away with Jeff Bridges covers some of this territory actually (lol, I know)
You come into my house and recommend that movie in front of my face?
It was pretty ludicrous all round, but the one scene that made everyone in the cinema groan out loud when I saw it in my home town was Lloyd and Tommy having a drink together, and smiling with pure delight when some eejit produced a round of flat pints which they then proceeded to knock back.
High crimes and misdemeanours right there! Gaze with horrified disbelief on this offence against God and all human decency!
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