Irish immigration to America, specifically during the 1800s, is often invoked as a historical instance of immigration done right. And looking back on it today, with so many descendants of Irish immigrants holding positions of power and influence in American society, and the popular celebration of Irish culture across the United States, the general consensus is that Irish immigration was good and made America what it is today. Even those on either extreme of the immigration argument can agree on this, the far left invoking it as an example of how any immigrant group can be integrated, while prominent ethno-nationalists on the far right dismiss this as simply a white immigrant group easily assimilating with an already white country.
It is, however, all too often forgotten that Irish immigration and integration was far from smooth. In fact, the wave of nearly 5 million Irish who arrived in America during the 19th century caused a litany of problems. Namely, widespread violence and crime.
So much so that certain terms like paddy wagon and stereotypes of the Irish taste for drink and fightin'have survived all the way into the 21st century. And while many might say that this depiction is simply just anti-Irish racism, of which there was plenty of in American history, It does have its basis in historical fact. As remembered in films like Gangs of New York and The Molly Maguires, Irish immigration brought with it organized crime and violent gangs.
New York being home to the likes of the Dead Rabbits and places like Pennsylvania to the Molly Maguires. And yes, the Irish were by no means the only group to establish gangs. America's native-born working class also had their own.
who would often clash with the Irish gangs in places like the infamous Five Points District in Manhattan. However, these nativist gangs arose directly out of competition for jobs and resources with the Irish immigrants, and likely would never have existed otherwise. And when looking at arrest records for New York City, which had at least 30,000 gang members by mid-century, we find that the Irish made up 55% of all those arrested, despite being only a quarter of the population. The fact that close to 30% of New York's police force was Irish at the time suggests that police bias was an unlikely factor. Furthermore, riots during the 1860s appeared to be almost exclusively Irish.
In 1862, 2,000 Irish immigrants rioted against the introduction of floating grain elevators into New York's harbour, as they would threaten Irish jobs. In 1863, they succeeded in burning two of these elevators down. And later that year, Irish rioting over conscription into the Union Army during the Civil War lasted for four days, requiring Abraham Lincoln to redeploy troops from the front line back to New York City. And then throughout the 1870s, Catholic Irish immigrants constantly clashed with Protestant Irish immigrants during the so-called Orange Order celebrations, again often resulting in bloody riots where many people were killed. Organized violence as a means of protest does have its roots in Irish culture.
The Molly Maguires were even founded in Ireland before relocating to Pennsylvania in the mid-19th century. In the 1860s and 1870s, the coal fields of Pennsylvania drew national attention when 16 men, most of them mining officials, were allegedly assassinated by the gang in response to wage cuts for workers. The Molly Maguires were also accused of committing numerous beatings and acts of industrial sabotage. What's more, the Irish in Pennsylvania were responsible for 30% of all homicides.
even though they only made up a fifth of the state's population. Nativism and poverty could perhaps explain Irish immigrant violence if it wasn't for Irish behavior on the West Coast. Nativism and anti-Irish sentiment during this period was largely confined to the Eastern United States. In the Western states, Irish immigrants also tended to fare much better in terms of money and power.
For example, in 1849, the San Francisco Chief of Police was an Irish Catholic, and appointed by leading businessmen of the city. In contrast, the entire night's watch of the Boston City Police resigned when the first Irishman was allowed to join the force in 1851. Yet still we see evidence of Irish immigrant violence in places like San Francisco. 60% of all those hanged in the city during the 1850s were Irish natives, despite them only making up 15% of the population. It also seems that the Irish were overrepresented in the Californian prison system. making up around 25% of all those incarcerated for homicide.
And then in the absence of nativist gangs to fight, it appears that the Irish chose the Chinese as their new rival, stemming as usual from competition in a certain industry, this time being laundry. 2% of all homicides over the entire 19th century in San Francisco were a result of this Chinese-Irish feud. So why were the Irish so violent in America?
Comparative studies of the island of Ireland at the time revealed to be one of the most peaceful countries in Europe, with a relatively low homicide rate of 2 per 100,000. Poverty and antagonism from nativist elements are not likely explanations, as the Irish experience of both differed widely. There is also the fact that despite most Irish immigrants being poor, they were markedly better off in the United States than back in Ireland, where there was the very real chance that they could die from starvation. This brings us to two other factors that are often overlooked. Chain migration and the fact that Ireland wasn't sending its best.
In the process of chain migration, typically a man from an Irish family would travel to an American city, establish himself there financially, before sending money home so the rest of his family could follow. An estimated $250 million was sent to Ireland between 1850 and 1900 for this very reason. And as much of half of all Irish immigration occurred in this way. And of course, if more Irish men than women and children were traveling to America, this would drastically affect the ratio between males and females, and thus the rate of violence and crime.
So let's look specifically at San Francisco, a city with a comparatively high homicide rate and ratio of men to women. The homicide rate in San Francisco between 1850 and 1854 was 40 per 100,000, falling to an average of 24 for the next five years, and 9.2 for the ten years after that. During the 1850s, there was only one woman for every nine men.
This ratio evened out to four women for every six men by 1870. And then by the 1880s, the Irish immigrant ratio came to reflect this. In the same decade, the Irish committed homicides, declined to 13%, only slightly disproportionate to their population of 12% of the city. However useful this theory of chain migration is, the fact still remains that the Irish immigrants were far more violent than the Irish back home, as well as other immigrant groups such as the Germans. The Germans, who overtook the Irish as the main immigrant group to America by the 1870s, demonstrated a tendency to commit less crime than the Americans, comprising only 10% of arrests as opposed to 23%. The reason for this is likely that German immigrants tended to be skilled workers, whereas the Irish ones were rarely literate and overwhelmingly identified themselves to immigration authorities as labourers or servants.
This allows us to assume that Ireland might not have been sending its best to America. The vast majority of Irish immigrants came from Ireland's most troubled regions, where the homicide rate could be as high as 8 per 100,000, four times higher than the national average. Furthermore, there were instances of systematic efforts to relocate the poorest of these areas to another country. The British government moved some 2,500 impoverished Irish from the province of Munster to farms in Ontario.
In other instances, landlords and wealthy families would participate in the resettling of Ireland's poor. The Wansfers of Kilkenny sent over 2,000 people to the mines of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin between 1840 and 1844. Philanthropists Ver Foster and James Hochchuk financed nearly 30,000 departures from the west of Ireland to the United States. And from 1848 to 1900, 80,000 more paupers were sent by the British government.
While the Irish have now integrated and have come to thrive in the United States, this was a rocky road to get to that took more than a hundred years. Even as white, Christian and English-speaking migrants, they still had severe problems fitting in. This suggests that it wasn't a lack of compatibility that resulted in disproportionate crime and violence, but rather it was the fact that the Irish immigrants were largely an Irish problem being exported to another country. A problem in that they were mostly uneducated, unskilled, and there wasn't enough resources in Ireland to sustain them.
And so through forces of both nature and society, they were relocated to America where they continued to be uneducated and unskilled, but they at least had enough food to eat. The lesson we can learn from this is that no matter how compatible culturally and racially an immigrant group are, if they have little to offer in terms of skills and education, they will bring with them higher levels of crime and violence. And whatever positive contributions to the host country they can make down the line, this should always be considered. And this shall haunt and towering, Yea, the maha-man-ma-