As always, at the outset of a new year, we raise our hopes as well as our glasses. The new year brings the opportunity for a fresh start in many things. We make promises and resolutions. Some of them we keep, many of them we do not.
As a newspaper, the Echo is tasked with a continuing resolution, that is to report as best we can the story of the Irish of America, the story of Ireland itself and of the many gifts that Ireland has bestowed upon the broader world.
It is quite a story, one that reflects
both richness and challenges, triumphs
and tragedies, successes and failures.
One of the stories that the Echo
has reported from its very birth in 1928
is that of immigration. Irish immigration
in America is Irish emigration in Ireland.
It is a double-edged tale, one that reflects the aforementioned pairing of triumph
and tragedy.
The most tragic aspects of emigration from Ireland are now, thankfully, receding into an ever more distant past. The coffin ships no longer ply the ocean, though the sadness of forced farewell continues to exist, even in our more cosseted and comfortable time.
Irish immigration, that being the
second part of the story once America's shores are attained, is a grand tale to say the least, one made more complicated in the America of recent times by virtue
of the fact that it is extremely difficult
for the Irish to gain legal access to the United States even if they can set foot
in it.
This is something of a cruel irony. Someday it might be the case that emigration from Ireland is purely a matter of choice and legal immigration to America is something that is possible to choose. This has never been the case for most, and is not even today the case for most.
As it happens, the arrival of 2012 promises a breakthrough in what has been the most recent chapter of the immigration part of the story.
The existence of two bills in the United States Senate that would offer E-3 visas is the most formal acknowledgment since the Donnelly and Morrison visas that the Irish, so great a portion of America's story, are lately reduced to the status of footnote by virtue of the form of immigration law that has evolved since 1965.
E-3 visas are fine in themselves, but they are not the complete answer. And, as it is typically the case with Congress, there is a complication in the process. The bills are not the same and they are coming from opposite sides of the political aisle.
Still, it is a most positive development that they exist at all. It is only to be hoped that, like New Year promises and resolutions, these bills are not neglected, abandoned or sidelined as the year, a general election one as it happens, leaves behind its first and, as always, most promising, days.
As all this hopefully proceeds it should be stressed that the crucial matter that is comprehensive immigration reform is still swinging in the wind.
It was doing so at the outset of the last presidential election year in 2008, with many saying at the time that the matter would only be addressed after the election was over. Well, it was not and reform remains elusive.
That brings us back to something more akin to a series of fix-it bills, such as the E-3 ones now before the Senate and which address components of the immigration issue as opposed to its entirety.
On the basis that half a loaf is better than none, so be it, for now. The Irish for sure deserve half the loaf, and certainly before it becomes more stale than it already is.
