There is no doubt that the Irish have become America’s most beloved immigrants. From having once been despised newcomers in the 19th century, their story has become embedded in ours as an example of rising beyond poverty and discrimination. Travel to any big city — especially in the Northeast — and you’ll find Irish pubs. And everyone becomes Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.

But Do the Irish Still Love America?

I just returned from Ireland, having met up with my daughter, son-in-law, and grandkids at their home in Arlington, VA. From there we flew to Dublin during the Easter weekend and spent the following week touring Ireland. We didn’t get a chance to travel the whole country, but did take in a good chunk of the northern half, including places like Belfast, Giants Causeway, Derry, Donegal, and Kells before driving back to Dublin. Yes, my son-in-law drove a rental car with the steering wheel on the right and the driving lanes on the left, just as in the United Kingdom.

From my short stay there, I concluded that the Irish still love Americans. And while travel sites advise American tourists that no, Europeans don’t really care what part of the States you’re from, I found that in Ireland the people are very curious about that.

Like the employee at the Titanic Museum in Belfast, who asked my SIL where he lived in the US. “Washington, DC,” he answered. The man then said, “Oh, your president is coming here!” (Joe Biden visited Ireland while we were there. It was all over British and Irish media).

Plus, when I was registering at our hotel in Donegal, the desk employee asked where I was from. “Kansas,” I told him. He said they don’t get many guests from there, but he knew that Kansas gets “proper thunderstorms. Not like the rain we have here.”

It also gave me a warm feeling to see that the pub across the street from our hotel in Dublin was flying Old Glory alongside the flag of the Republic of Ireland. (Yes, the pub is called the “Hairy Lemon.” The name has an interesting backstory.)

Personal photo.

So from my short stay I found that the Irish were warm and welcoming to those of us from the United States.

What a Shopkeeper in Donegal Said

We spent a couple of days in County Donegal, the most northwestern county, where the weather was wet and blustery, the landscape rocky and wild. Donegal Town was a postcard image of an Irish town.

My daughter and I visited a pottery shop there, where we bought some items. The woman running the shop, who appeared to be in her mid-late 50’s, chatted with us, once again curious as to where we lived in the US. She told us her daughter was living in Canada, but then said something that shocked me:

“When I was coming up, everyone wanted to move to America. But now the young adults want to go to England or Canada.”

“I don’t know what’s happening in your country.”

Neither my daughter nor I knew quite what to say. The shopkeeper’s tone wasn’t sarcastic; rather she seemed sad as to how perceptions of America had changed.

The Trump Effect on Irish Immigration

The woman’s claim was, of course, anecdotal, so I decided to do some researching. I found very little on the internet.

But I did find a story from the Irish Times which expressed concern about the greater number of Irish leaving the country for good rather than returning. For young adults, there is greater opportunity in other parts of the world than in Ireland. The data the Times used was from 2019 — which I appreciated because it reflected pre-pandemic reality.

The fact that Irish emigrants are largely going to England is no surprise. After all, it’s closer, and residents of Northern Ireland are already citizens of the UK. But the story also shed truth on what the shopkeeper told us — Irish emigration to the United States was down, and had started dropping during the Trump years:

 Emigration to the United States has steadily decreased during Donald Trump’s presidency. The numbers fell to 5,200 in 2019 from 5,800 last year and 6,500 in the 12 months to April 2017, three months after he took office.

Trump haters will point this out as just another example of how toxic the former president is, especially when it comes to immigration. As the narrative goes, Donald Trump is a nativist who hates immigrants.

I’m no Trump supporter, and let’s be honest here: with his belligerent, erratic temperament, Trump is his own worst enemy. But he is not the sole cause of young Irish preferring Canada to the United States.

Progressivism Influences Irish Minds

Look also at the Democrats, who did their best to undermine Trump’s presidency from the start, along with their fellow travelers in the media. And what our media says here goes ’round the world.

As former Attorney General Bill Barr wrote in his memoir, One Damn Thing After Another:

In the latter years of the Obama presidency, formerly respectable news outlets simply stopped producing news and instead turned out consensus left-liberal opinion cloaked in the garb of objective “news.” Well before the rise of Donald Trump, the media had become the progressive movement’s propaganda arm.

So what do the Irish hear from United States media? Progressive propaganda, wrapped up in the New York Times and Washington Post.

But that’s not all. According to Forbes, Canada itself has become more welcoming to new immigrants than the United States, due to new American laws, and it shows in the numbers.

Of course for those who have illegally come across our southern border, the rules don’t count.

And Then There’s Crime

Three days after we spoke to the shopkeeper in Donegal, the Chicago “Loop” shopping district exploded into bedlam as hundreds of teens and young adults attacked pedestrians and jumped on vehicles in social-media ignited “takeovers.” In a further insult to citizens upset by the violence, newly elected mayor Brandon Johnson chided them for “demonizing children.”

So Chicago and other American cities have now become synonymous with crime and chaos. Don’t you think that reputation makes its way to places like Ireland?

During the few days I spent in Dublin and Belfast, I didn’t hear one siren. Not one. That doesn’t mean that crime doesn’t happen there, of course. But both those cities are diverse, and I saw people of all colors and ethnicities walk the streets without incident, even assiduously keeping to the right on sidewalks — which were sometimes quite narrow. Nor did I have to keep my head on a swivel in Ireland.

Ronald Reagan famously referred to America as a “shining city on a hill.” For many immigrants, it remains so. But that light has become somewhat dimmed, due to the pernicious effects of progressivism. We can become that beacon once again if we shed progressive poison and re-embrace the traditions of family and faith that made America the land of promise as it did for the Irish of the past.

Featured image: Irish immigrants in Kansas City, 1909. Wikimedia Commons/cropped/public domain.