Irish Migration To The United States

The Irish people were faced with many problems in their home countries of Ireland that caused them to migrate to the United States. The first wave of people that migrated to the United States in the nineteenth century were Protestants, political refugees, and Catholic peasants. Most of these people were farmers that had their land taken from them, or their landlords no longer leased the land because of an interest in grazing. According to the textbook A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, “…the Irish were driven from their beloved homeland by ‘English tyranny,’ the British ‘yoke’ ‘enslaving’ Ireland…movement to America was ‘artificial,’ explained one Irish immigrant, because the poverty of Ireland had been created by English colonial policies.” The Irish people blamed the British for their poverty and for their migration to America. …show more content…
According to the Constitutional Rights Foundation, “more than half of the Irish people depended on the potato as the main part of their diet, and almost 40 percent had a diet consisting of entirely potatoes…if the potato crop failed, there was nothing to replace it.” It was in the summer of 1845 that the first sign of trouble occurred. The crop seemed to be flourishing, but when the potatoes were being harvested there were signs that the crops were diseased. By spring of 1846, there was a state of panic, because the food supplies were dissipating, leaving people to find their own food. In 1855, the Great Famine finally took its toll, leaving over one million people dead from hunger and sickness. This led people to leave Ireland, and go to the land of