Yeats wrote about romantic Ireland being dead and gone and with O’Leary in the grave.
What would the great poet say about immigrant America?
We can only guess. But the idea of a grave springs to mind easily enough when the focus is on today’s United States and its relationship with people from other lands who want to make America their new home.
It also springs to mind with regard to people from other lands already here and trying to make America their new home.
Count quite a few Irish in that category.
Looking around the political landscape as it exists in the first half of 2025 it would be fair to assume that the prospects of the undocumented and illegal, Irish and otherwise, securing legality to the point of feeling safe and secure in a new homeland have never been dimmer.
This is a hard time, and one made harder by the fact that champions of something approaching comprehensive immigration reform are either silent or in the grave – literally.
And Congress is silent on the immigration matter to the point of being itself in a political tomb.
This is no great surprise as on one side of the aisle you have the enraged, and on the other side the enraptured.
This is not fertile ground for deal making and compromise.
There was a time for deal-making compromise, those of a certain age will recall. All the meaningful reform pushes from the 1980s up to 2013 were bipartisan efforts.
One of those champions of joint effort died earlier this year at the age of 93. Alan Simpson was a Republican Senator from Wyoming during those relatively halcyon days.
Simpson was at his most active in the 1980s. He had a significant hand in creating the phenomenon of the undocumented Irish, but then followed up with an effort to provide lottery-style visas.
Simpson teamed up with Democratic Congressman Peter Rodino of New Jersey to craft the “Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.”
This barred employers from hiring the undocumented and illegal but also provided legal status by way of an amnesty to those who had arrived in the U.S. before 1982.
Most of the Irish who struck out for America in the 1980s arrived after that cut off year, hence the subsequent battles that gave birth to a line of visa lotteries.
One front in those battles was the U.S. Senate and it was here that Alan Simpson teamed up with Senator Edward Kennedy for the Kennedy/Simpson Bill of 1988. This bill proposed, among other things, 55,000 “Independent Immigrants” visas to be awarded on a points basis. It was said that the Republican from Wyoming and the Democrat from Massachusetts were simultaneously ideological rivals and legislative allies.
Such a combination seems beyond wishful thinking today, and looking back we could indeed be talking about a political galaxy long long ago and far far away.
Kennedy would be prominent in the reform effort for the rest of his life, most especially in partnership with Republican Senator John McCain. The two teamed up for the McCain/Kennedy bill of 2007 – formally the “Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act.”
A few years on, there was another bipartisan effort in the Senate by way of the so-called “Gang of Eight” reform bill. It passed the Senate but, in an example of no good deed going unpunished, was allowed to die in the House of Representatives.
The gang members were Republican Senators Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Marco Rubio and Jeff Flake.
McCain died in 2018. Flake left the Senate the following year, and Marco Rubio is now U.S. Secretary of State. That leaves Lindsey Graham, who lately appears well past his sell by date when it comes to immigration reform.
The four Democrats in the gang were Michael Bennet, who now has his eyes firmly fixed on the governorship of Colorado. Bob Menendez is gone from the Senate in disgrace and facing an eleven year sentence for corruption. Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin remain on station.
Durbin, from Illinois, and Schumer from New York have their hands full with a lot of issues courtesy of the Trump administration.
Immigration reform isn’t one of them, though much of what is going on in 2025 America with regard to immigration involves the illegal and undocumented - but in terms of how to remove them from the fifty states by means of mass deportation.
Immigration has never been seen in one percent positive terms by the United States and many among its native-born inhabitants. There were times when it seemed barely tolerated. Now even “barely” seems a stretch in the context of those who seek nothing more than an escape from the shadows and entry into a regular, legal, life.
This would seem odd, indeed ironic, in a land where everyone is either an immigrant, a descendant of immigrants, a descendant of slaves, or Native American.
But along with ideas of reform, irony is very much on the outs too.
It will likely be years before the pendulum swings with regard to reforming immigration and making it possible for the illegal and undocumented to secure legal status and a full American life.
That’s if it ever swings at all.
