Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

By the time of the famine that began in 1845, impoverished and colonized Ireland had already been bleeding its population through emigration, mostly to the United States. By the 1830s, Irish Catholics outnumbered Scots Irish Protestants in the United States. By 1840, Irish Catholic immigrants constituted a third of the immigrant population, which increased to half the immigrant population with the arrival of the famine refugees after 1845. Many well-off Irish Catholics as well as Scots Irish Protestants immigrated to the United States both before and after US independence, but poverty was the rule for the famine refugees, and anti-Catholicism in the United States was virulent. Irish American historian Patrick Higgins points out that early on in their North American and Caribbean colonies, the British exported colonized Irish as a surplus population, creating a kind of “pressure valve.”15 As Cecil B. Rhodes famously said in the late nineteenth century, I was in the East End of London (a working-class quarter) yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread! bread!’ and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism. . . . My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the forty million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus ...