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>> 201 6 Paddy and Paddiette Go to Washington Race and Transnational Immigration Politics Contemporary immigration politics is among the most complex and volatile sites of identity and belonging in the United States. As with urban redevelopment policies, immigration politics are as contradictory as ever in this current neoliberal climate. This is perhaps best illustrated by the Secure Communities Program, which was established in 2008 to assist with the deportation of dangerous criminals. Many local police departments have conducted fingerprint checks with the Department of Homeland Security. While the program is supposed to operate nationwide, there is considerable confusion regarding whether participation is mandatory, in addition to controversy surrounding the deportation of nonviolent offenders. As a result, the states of New York, Illinois , and Massachusetts have withdrawn from the program.1 Much of this uncertainty stems from the priorities of the executive branch being at odds with state and local authorities. As Philip Kretsedemas has shown in his examination of neoliberal immigration governance , our most recent presidents, irrespective of political affiliation, have pursued free-market agendas predicated upon the mobility of capital , goods, and services, but also people. While the number of temporary work visas has expanded in recent years, most immigrants arrive 202 > 203 over the summer of 2007, the ILIR sought a bilateral trade agreement between the United States and the Republic of Ireland, where immigration politics were marred equally by race. Ultimately, this chapter considers the salience of race to transnational immigration politics. Efforts to “legalize the Irish” largely have been cast aside in both Ireland and the United States, and thus the undocumented Irish are relegated to a political limbo in which their legal status remains unresolved. Legalize the Irish Immigration politics certainly is not new to Irish Americans, who have mobilized in the wake of major changes to U.S. immigration law. During the 1920s, Congress made the unprecedented move to reduce immigration to the United States and established quotas that significantly favored immigrants, albeit in smaller numbers, from northern and western Europe. While limits on European immigration were unprecedented at the time, legal restrictions informed by race, class, and gender were not. Chinese and Japanese immigrants were barred from entering the United States in 1882 and 1907, respectively, while immigrants from India were excluded beginning in 1917 as part of a larger ban on the “Asiatic Pacific Zone.” Furthermore, the Supreme Court ruled that Asian immigrants were ineligible for U.S. citizenship. Filipino migrants, who filled the labor void resulting from these restrictions, were accorded somewhat better treatment as nationals of the United States but were subject, nonetheless, to local antimiscegenation laws. The head tax initially legislated in 1882 and raised in the years that followed limited working-class and working-poor immigrant access to the United States, as did the literacy test enacted by Congress in 1917 (over three presidential vetoes). The “likely to become a public charge” (LPC) clause of 1891 similarly excluded those likely to be poor, and some custom officials interpreted this provision to exclude single women. The Page Act of 1875, though intended to prevent the entry of prostitutes, largely was used to keep Chinese women from entering the United States, undoubtedly a device to prevent the establishment of long-term Chinese American communities. American citizens also were subject to restrictions as women experienced the termination of their citizenship upon marriage to a foreign national. While the new 1920s laws often are 204 > 205 origins–based system due to its “DISCRIMINATION solely on religious grounds . . . because it would reduce immigration from countries predominantly Catholic and Jewish.” His concern for other immigrant groups reflected interethnic alliances that Irish Americans forged in organizations such as the Knights of Columbus and the National Welfare Catholic Council, which mobilized in opposition to anti-Catholic rhetoric and legislation during that era.5 McSweeney’s primary concern, and that of Irish Americans at large, was not how national origins quotas affected other groups but how it specifically affected the Irish. Joseph Carey, president of the American Irish Republic League, more clearly articulated Irish American sentiment. In his 1927 testimony before Congress, Carey maintained that the federal government should keep the 1890 formula in place rather than transition to national origins. Whether using a quota formula based on national origins or a percentage of the foreign-born population in 1890, southern and eastern European nations still would be allotted small quotas, as significant numbers of their emigrants were not present in the United States at either juncture...

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