John Healy Quotes
We had people and we exported them faster than cattle, and like cattle, and while fathers, sons, and daughters cried all the way to the train and the bus and the ship, the flow back of emigrant cheques and money orders evaporated the maternal and wifely tears so that on the threshold of the Post Office or the Hibernian Bank below in main street you would make a little more with every passing week.
The Irish emigrants often sent money home to their families from the United States or other country they had gone to. In many cases, the family members would use the money to follow and the people drain grew even larger. For many years people were Ireland’s largest exports.
John Healy, 1930–1991, Irish Journalist & Author, The Death of an Irish Town, 1968
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
this quotation illustrates that illegal immigration to the United States is not the desired solution on the point of view of all Mexicans. Many see it as a drain of the best and the brightest—those who are most self actualizing. It was good politics for the mayor can campaign on a program of strengthening the local economy so that people would not have to emigrate.
This early Irish emigration—mostly to America—were mostly Ulster Presbyterians known in America as “Scotch-Irish”. The editors were very concerned as the emigrants were the backbone of the Ulster workforce. The huge Catholic emigration would come later.
This was just the beginning of the vast emigration from Ireland to America and elsewhere.
In many cases, one spouse is a citizen and the other is not; or the parents might be but not the children; of the children were born in the United States but the parents were not citizens and had no documentation. Under the broken immigration system then, the government would actually deport one family member. Sometimes it was the breadwinner and the legal wife and children would then be forced onto welfare, the taxpayers would have to pay for a family that was doing fine until the government intervened; worst, the children would be kept apart from their father who could not even visit them thereafter. It was the only circumstance in the American system where government would actually destroy families when “family friendliness” was the official policy.
See {640101} for his view of the relationship between language and nationality and {640100} for his definition of a nation which is what most people use.
John Healy (1930–1991) was an Irish journalist from Charlestown, County Mayo, who wrote for Western People and The Irish Times.
