A Comparative Study of the Irish Potato Famine Migration and the Modern Hispanic Migration
There is no doubt that the Irish Potato Famine of the 1800’s and the recent Hispanic Migration movement are the two most influential mass migrations to the United States. People in the millions left their homes voluntarily to cross international borders in search of economic and social opportunity in an industrialized America, where the minorities were gradually becoming represented in politics and gaining benefits and jobs that these poor agriculturally-based labourers would have not received in their home countries. The Irish and Hispanic migrants similarly received anti-immigrant sentiments from the native born United States citizens that would affect …show more content…
Beginning in the early nineteenth century, America experienced the Industrial Revolution, where industry booming and therefore the demand for labour was higher than it had been in recent years. However, the nineteenth century was not simply a time of prosperity; across the Atlantic Ocean in Ireland, impoverished people were losing their only means of survival: the potato. With three quarters of Irish laborers having no regular employment of any kind by 1835, poverty forced the Irish to compete for arable land; Ireland was not industrialized. A census report done in 1841 found that nearly half the families in rural, countryside areas lived in windowless mud cabins, most of which had no furnishings except for a single stool. The easiest way for labourers to provide for their families was to rent or purchase a plot of land and grow potatoes. Since the potato was adaptable to the coastal Irish climate, almost 40 percent of the population had a diet consisting almost entirely of potatoes, with some milk or fish as the only other source of nutrition1. With almost half of the Irish people depending on the potato as their main food source, the sudden emergence of rotting potatoes caused mass panic and starvation; according to the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, it is estimated that “during the years 1845 to 1850, around 800,000 people died of starvation or of a famine-related disease such as typhus, dysentery, scurvy or pellagra”. Such environmentally damaging conditions forced many Irish peasants turn over their farms to their wealthy English landlords, whose Whig government back in England refused to stop from exporting oats and grain whilst the poor Irish were suffering from starvation and famine. The Whigs would not reduce grain prices for the Irish because they believe in
There is no doubt that the Irish Potato Famine of the 1800’s and the recent Hispanic Migration movement are the two most influential mass migrations to the United States. People in the millions left their homes voluntarily to cross international borders in search of economic and social opportunity in an industrialized America, where the minorities were gradually becoming represented in politics and gaining benefits and jobs that these poor agriculturally-based labourers would have not received in their home countries. The Irish and Hispanic migrants similarly received anti-immigrant sentiments from the native born United States citizens that would affect …show more content…
Beginning in the early nineteenth century, America experienced the Industrial Revolution, where industry booming and therefore the demand for labour was higher than it had been in recent years. However, the nineteenth century was not simply a time of prosperity; across the Atlantic Ocean in Ireland, impoverished people were losing their only means of survival: the potato. With three quarters of Irish laborers having no regular employment of any kind by 1835, poverty forced the Irish to compete for arable land; Ireland was not industrialized. A census report done in 1841 found that nearly half the families in rural, countryside areas lived in windowless mud cabins, most of which had no furnishings except for a single stool. The easiest way for labourers to provide for their families was to rent or purchase a plot of land and grow potatoes. Since the potato was adaptable to the coastal Irish climate, almost 40 percent of the population had a diet consisting almost entirely of potatoes, with some milk or fish as the only other source of nutrition1. With almost half of the Irish people depending on the potato as their main food source, the sudden emergence of rotting potatoes caused mass panic and starvation; according to the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, it is estimated that “during the years 1845 to 1850, around 800,000 people died of starvation or of a famine-related disease such as typhus, dysentery, scurvy or pellagra”. Such environmentally damaging conditions forced many Irish peasants turn over their farms to their wealthy English landlords, whose Whig government back in England refused to stop from exporting oats and grain whilst the poor Irish were suffering from starvation and famine. The Whigs would not reduce grain prices for the Irish because they believe in