Irish-American Politicians Are Building the Walls Their Starving Ancestors Would Have Died At

A community that survived British induced famine and American nativism has produced some of the most powerful anti-immigrant lawmakers in modern history.

A quick note before we begin: it’s St. Paddy’s Day, not St. Patty’s Day. “Paddy” comes from Pádraig, the Irish form of Patrick. In Ireland, “patty" can mean a hamburger. The Irish have been correcting this for decades.

Today, a river in Chicago runs green, shamrock pins gleam on lapels in the Capitol, and somewhere in Washington, a politician whose great-grandparents fled Ireland on a famine ship is posting a St. Paddy’s Day photo while simultaneously advancing the most aggressive anti-immigrant agenda in modern American history.

Kevin McCarthy, great-grandson of an Irish Catholic immigrant from County Cork, built his political brand on “Build the Wall, Enforce the Law.” According to CBS News, he sponsored the “Build the Wall, Enforce the Law Act” in 2018, a bill dedicating over $23 billion to border wall construction, sanctuary city defunding, and mass deportation measures.

Mitch McConnell, whose Scots-Irish family traces back to that same County Cork and the Ulster Presbyterian communities of Appalachia, spent decades blocking comprehensive immigration reform. Mike Pence, whose maternal grandfather emigrated from Ireland in 1923, championed Trump’s Muslim ban. Paul Ryan backed enforcement-heavy immigration bills while privately expressing sympathy for Dreamers he never actually protected.

The question worth sitting with today is how some of the most powerful Irish Americans turn their ancestors’ success into a weapon aimed at the people still walking the road their forefathers once traveled.

I'm fighting to document histories like this one before they get buried under green beer and selective memory, and I need your help.

Between 1845 and 1854, according to the Bill of Rights Institute, approximately 2.9 million immigrants arrived in the United States, a significant portion of them Irish Catholics fleeing a famine that killed one in seven people on their island. One in four Irish survived by leaving.

When they arrived, they set foot in a country that did not want them.

Posters in Boston, as reported by Smithsonian Magazine, proclaimed that Catholics were “vile imposters, liars, villains, and cowardly cutthroats.” Protestant mobs attacked Irish neighborhoods and burned Churches. A fraudulent exposé accusing Catholic priests of raping nuns and strangling babies sold hundreds of thousands of copies, despite being completely fabricated. The conspiracies didn’t need to be true. They just needed to spread.

Out of this atmosphere rose the Know Nothing Party, officially the “American Party”, which at its peak in the 1850s controlled more than 100 congressional seats, eight governorships, and half a dozen state legislatures. Their platform demanded a 21-year naturalization waiting period for immigrants, mandatory Bible reading in schools, and the elimination of all Catholics from public office. They wanted Irish people, specifically, out of American political life.

Now read this, from a Know Nothing-aligned publication in the 1850s, describing Irish Catholic immigrants: a criminal class, loyal to a foreign power, incapable of self-government, breeding too fast, threatening the Protestant foundations of the republic. Then read this, from Trump allies and their congressional supporters in recent years: Latino migrants are “invaders,” bringing crime, loyal to foreign interests, replacing American culture, overwhelming the system.

The script didn’t change.

The Climb, and the Turn

Irish communities did not wait to be welcomed. As the Bill of Rights Institute documents, Irish immigrants arrived with something nativists underestimated: political skill. Catholic Irish men had spent decades organizing electoral movements in Ireland and fighting for civil rights under British rule. They brought those organizing instincts to American cities and built political machines in New York, Boston, and Chicago, not because the country opened its arms, but because they forced their way into rooms that were designed to keep them out.

By the mid-20th century, as America Magazine reports, Irish Catholics formed a backbone of the Democratic coalition. As late as 1964, 76 percent of U.S. Catholics voted for Lyndon Johnson. John F. Kennedy’s 1960 election felt, to many Irish Americans, like the ultimate validation: a famine people’s grandson in the White House.

Then came the drift.

According to America Magazine, beginning in the 1930s, Irish Americans shifted toward the Republican Party as they entered “higher-skill” professions, the suburbs, and the white-collar economy. The parish-and-precinct solidarity that once bound Irish communities to working-class Democratic politics gave way to white flight, “law and order” politics, and culture war alignment. Non-Hispanic Catholics, many of them of Irish descent, now vote predominantly Republican.

As Maurice O’Sullivan writes in America Magazine, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell “reflect the centripetal force of American culture” pulling immigrants toward assimilation and conservatism, and away from solidarity with those still arriving.

That’s a generous framing. Another framing is this: a community that clawed its way past nativist gatekeepers became the gatekeepers.

The Shamrock at the Checkpoint

According to America Magazine, Kevin McCarthy is the great-grandson of an Irish Catholic immigrant from County Cork, and the first Republican in his family. He reportedly now attends Valley Baptist Church in Bakersfield, California. Mitch McConnell’s Scots-Irish family came from Cork and Ulster, and he is a member of an evangelical megachurch in Louisville. Mike Pence’s grandfather came from Ireland in 1923 and settled in Chicago. Pence grew up in a family that idolized John Kennedy. He later became one of the architects of the Muslim ban.

The same Irish heritage that once made a man politically suspect in elite American circles now functions as a respectable American credential, deployed during March photo opportunities while ICE raids proceed quietly elsewhere.

Historian Christopher Phillips, as quoted in Smithsonian Magazine, puts it plainly: “The context is different, but the themes are consistent. The actors are still the same, but with different names.”

The Know Nothings feared Irish Catholics would bring crime, disease, and foreign allegiance. Today’s restrictionists say the same about Latinos and Muslims. The Irish were depicted in 19th-century cartoons as simian and violent, imagery later recycled against Black and immigrant communities. The language is of contagion, the warnings about “breeding,” the claims that these newcomers are fundamentally incompatible with American democracy. It is the same speech, delivered by different mouths, aimed at different faces.

What the Parade Won’t Tell You

St. Paddy’s Day parades in America began as acts of survival and defiance in a country that wanted the Irish gone. They became mainstream because Irish communities organized, resisted, and outlasted the people who burned their churches.

That history does not belong only to the Irish. It belongs to every community currently living through its first chapter on American soil. When Irish-ancestry power brokers perform sentimental Irishness in March while spending the other eleven months making sure desperate families from Latin America and the Middle East cannot access the country that once saved their own ancestors from starvation, they are not honoring their history. They are betraying it.

America has always been more comfortable celebrating the immigrant story once it’s over than tolerating it while it’s happening. The door was opened for the Irish. Some of them are now holding it shut.

Sources

1. Billings, Mathieu. “Nativist Riots and the Know-Nothing Party.” Bill of Rights Institute, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, Chapter 7: 1844–1860.
2. Boissoneault, Lorraine. “How the 19th-Century Know Nothing Party Reshaped American Politics.” Smithsonian Magazine, January 26, 2017.
3. Elliott, Kimberly Kutz. “Nativism, Immigration, and the Know-Nothing Party.” Smarthistory, n.d.
4. O’Sullivan, Maurice. “JFK to Mitch McConnell: How Irish Americans Went from Reliable Democrats to Leading the GOP.” America Magazine, March 16, 2023.
5. Schmuhl, Robert. “Crossing Over: Irish in Government.” Irish America Magazine, 2020.
6. Segers, Grace. “Kevin McCarthy Says He Will Introduce Bill to Fully Fund Border Wall.” CBS News, October 9, 2018.
7. Bade, Rachael. “Ryan and McCarthy Split on Dreamers.” Politico, May 17, 2018.