Economic migrants laid the foundation for our prosperity

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

I knew a man who was an economic migrant. He left his home to cross the ocean in the search for a better life; not because he was impoverished or without options in the homeland, but just because he wanted a better life and he thought that emigrating to a faraway country would be the way to achieve this.

He was my father – and the place he went to was Boston. It could as easily have been Cricklewood, only his sister had already made the trip to Massachusetts.

He didn’t leave Ower in Rosscahill because he was being persecuted or starving with the hunger; he just wanted a different life.

So did millions of others, who crossed the Atlantic or the Irish Sea since time immemorial or those who headed Down Under, making their lives better and sending money home to improve the lives of those who stayed behind.

That’s why today about 70 million people claim Irish heritage or ancestry across the globe – quite a number for an island of only six million people. And every last one of them owes their roots to an economic migrant.

America offered the same chances to other nationalities and ethnic groups (even if the last President was hell-bent on a big wall) and that’s why so many on that side of the pond will tell you they are Italian, Spanish, Scottish, Mexican or wherever – because their forefathers moved there too to improve their economic lot.

We know that our citizens can still migrate to the UK because of our ‘special relationship’ that usurps even Brexit – which is just as well; otherwise our graduates might also find themselves on the slow boat to Rwanda.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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