Last month I reported on the sizable number of Irish women who immigrated to the United States in the early part of the 20th Century.
Pre-famine immigrants from Ireland mainly were male, while in the famine years and their aftermath, entire families left the country.
But by the turn of the 20th Century, most Irish immigrants were women.
According to the U.S. Library of Congress, the Irish constituted over one-third of all immigrants to the United States between 1820 and 1860.
In the 1840s, they comprised almost half of all immigrants to this nation.
The Irish immigrants of the 19th and early 20th Centuries left a rural lifestyle in a nation lacking modern industry. Many immigrants found themselves unprepared for the industrialized, urban centers in the United States.
That’s part the reason, many Irish women entered domestic service when they arrived in the United States in the early 20th Century.
For the last couple of decades, however, Irish immigration has only been a trickle. U.S. immigration policies have favored people who are highly educated or with specialized training.
I intend to talk more about that in the coming months, including the Visa programs which are most often used by the Irish to gain long-term entry into the United States.
One program that has received the most focus in recent years is the E3 Visa for employment in specialty occupations established as part of a free trade agreement between the U.S. and Australia that took effect in January 2005.
The proposed legislation would allow Irish nationals to use the unclaimed number of the 10,500 nonimmigrant Visas awarded to Australia annually.
In the last Congress, Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin proposed the legislation on March 17 of 2021. Republican Sen. Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania was his bipartisan cosponsor.
Toomey did not seek re-election last year and Durbin will need to find a new Republican cosponsor in the Senate.
The lead sponsor of the House bill in the last Congress was Democratic Representative Richard Neal of Massachusetts.
With Republicans now in control of the House, former House cosponsor Rep. Mike Kelley of Pennsylvania may now become the lead sponsor with Richard Neal as his cosponsor.
The House bill was not introduced until Aug. 30 last year in the waning months of the 117th Congress.
So next month we should be on the lookout whether either chamber introduces a new bill on St. Patrick’s Day.
