The "Irish oppression in the U$" has been blown WAY out of proportion — and I'm saying this as somebody whose father's parents emigrated from Belfast. It comes from a small number of things that, in most of the country, didn't have much sway:
1) the earlier days of the KKK includes a massive hate-on not just for non-whites, but all immigrants and Catholics; the Irish who were emigrating were typically Catholic, and
2) as was common practise for the 19th Century CE, adverts for domestics or other immigrant-dominated employment would specify ethnicity or religion sought for a wide variety of reasons; on occasion, these adverts would specify "No Irish", but nevertheless, the Irish also tended to dominate those jobs: http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/no-irish.htm
So yeah, there *is* a little merit to that history of discrimination as an extension of discrimination against *all* immigrants, but considering that Irish-Amerikans are the second-largest ethnic group in the $tates after German-Amerikans, it's kind of hard for that minute history of discrimination to have any solid meaning in the here and now.
no subject
1) the earlier days of the KKK includes a massive hate-on not just for non-whites, but all immigrants and Catholics; the Irish who were emigrating were typically Catholic, and
2) as was common practise for the 19th Century CE, adverts for domestics or other immigrant-dominated employment would specify ethnicity or religion sought for a wide variety of reasons; on occasion, these adverts would specify "No Irish", but nevertheless, the Irish also tended to dominate those jobs:
http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/no-irish.htm
So yeah, there *is* a little merit to that history of discrimination as an extension of discrimination against *all* immigrants, but considering that Irish-Amerikans are the second-largest ethnic group in the $tates after German-Amerikans, it's kind of hard for that minute history of discrimination to have any solid meaning in the here and now.