Historian Tyler Anbinder stumbled upon 19th-century records of the Emigrant Bank in New York City while he was researching a book about the Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan.
What he found has upended more than 150 years of assumptions about the approximately 1.3 million immigrants from Ireland who came to the United States during and just after the Great Famine of the 1840s.
His book, Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York, came out earlier this year. In an era before photo IDs, the bank, which catered to Irish, collected details on each of its customers so they could later prove who they were to bank clerks, including the year and exact place they were born, the name of the ship that took them over, and the names of their parents and their siblings and children. The details made it possible for Anbinder to track their movements in the United States, with the help of a small army of research assistants and a professional genealogist.
Anbinder is a professor emeritus at George Washington University. He spoke with the Register’s Matt McDonald by telephone on July 9. A transcript of the interview is below; it has been edited for space and clarity.
For many years, historians have assumed that Irish Famine immigrants were destitute when they arrived in America, didn’t do very well after they got here, and that their children, for the most part, didn’t do very well either. … Your findings turn those assumptions on their head: that most Famine Irish weren’t destitute, since they had enough money to pay for the boat and for food and clothing to get to America; that they tended to work hard and saved a surprising amount of money in their bank accounts; and that they were upwardly mobile, often starting out as unskilled laborers and ending their lives as artisans or business owners. What image of Famine Irish immigrants should people have?
I think the image that people should have of the Famine Irish in America is that of people who were extraordinary in Ireland and extraordinary once they got to America. In terms of their background in Ireland, what you can see when you look at the famine immigrants who get to America is that these were not just run-of-the-mill inhabitants of Ireland. They were much more likely to be able to read and write than the typical inhabitant of Ireland. They were much more likely to have been trained in an artisanal skill, like carpenter, tailor, shoemaker, things of that sort. And they were much more likely than the typical inhabitant of Ireland during the famine to have savings.
And all these things were what made it possible to come to America. And then there were things that helped them thrive once they got to America. So even though more famine immigrants when they arrived in America worked as day laborers than anything else, these were people who were very ambitious to improve their status and they had social networks in America that they could use to fulfill those ambitions. And so they networked very diligently to find better jobs than the ones that they had when they first got to New York or Boston or Philadelphia. And they saved money really like crazy.
And you can imagine why that would be the case, because having seen people dying all around them, often their own family members, they were obsessed with saving money so that they would never be in that position again.
Loud, prolonged coughing during Sunday Mass was common in New York City during the 1850s. Archbishop John Hughes called tuberculosis “the natural death of Irish emigrants.” You have heartbreaking stories in the book about short-lived people who worked hard and died early. Many of them had it rough, didn’t they?
Yes, health was a really big problem for the famine immigrants. And my book is filled with stories of famine immigrants who make it to America, often through extraordinary efforts, only to pass away within months or a year or two of arrival. And then even those who survived several years, often, as you mentioned, died of communicable diseases that were especially rampant in the tenements that the Famine Irish tended to live in. Respiratory ailments were definitely number one. Tuberculosis, lung infections from things like pneumonia. These were the big killers of the Irish.
But the Famine Irish also died of lots of other things. Heart disease took a terrible toll. You find in particular with the saloon keepers. Becoming a saloon keeper was one of the highest goals of many of the famine immigrants because it was a position of respect, it paid very well, and yet I found looking in my chapter on saloon keepers, that saloon keepers died even younger than the average famine immigrant. You wouldn’t have thought that, given that they had a lot of money, but being stuck inside all day in a smoke-filled bar room clearly was bad for their health. And the saloon keepers, they seemed to die in their 30s more often than anything else.
Your book is primarily about 19th-century history, but you make some references to current-day affairs, including current U.S. immigration policy. Immigration skeptics say that immigrants take jobs that Americans need. Former President Donald Trump, for instance, during the presidential debate June 27, said immigrants are taking what he called “black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs.” What do you say to that?
I think the one thing that’s made clear from the story of the famine immigrants is that immigrants definitely make many more jobs than they take, and this is the case today, just as it was for the Famine Irish because of discrimination that the Irish faced back then and immigrants today face now, immigrants are much more likely to create businesses than take jobs as employees. And that was the case with the Famine Irish, and that’s the case today. And so you find when you look at the Famine Irish , the Famine Irish immigrants were more likely to own their own businesses in America than native-born Americans were to own businesses in America.
And the same holds true for immigrants today. They have a much higher rate of entrepreneurship than native-born Americans. And so, you can debate whether immigrants take the jobs of native-born Americans or not, but I think what you can say for sure is that immigrants definitely create more jobs than they take as employees.
It’s not the case when the immigrant first gets to America, and that shows in my book. We tend to focus on the immigrant when they first set foot in America, and then we lose track of that. And so native-born Americans 150 years ago, and even scholars until recently, assumed that the Famine Irish stayed day laborers their whole lives. As I show in the book, they very quickly moved on to other things, and the day laborer of one day becomes the employer of others a decade later. And that’s the case now just as it was with the Famine Irish.
Some Americans during the 19th century worried that the United States was being overwhelmed by Famine immigrants from Ireland. A March 2021 Gallup poll found that 42 million who live in Latin America and the Caribbean would move to the United States if they could. In June 2017, Gallup found that 147 million people worldwide would move to the United States if they could. Are there limits to what the United States can reasonably withstand when it comes to immigration?
I think there are definitely limits to the number of immigrants that the United States could accommodate at any one time. But I also think that supply and demand, the free market, is the best way to regulate the movement of people around the world. What you see when you look at American immigration history is, when there are jobs, immigrants come to America. And when there aren’t any jobs, immigrants leave. That happened during the Great Depression; that happened during the Great Recession; that happened during the pandemic.
And so, the United States economy has, throughout history, been really good at regulating the number of immigrants who come to the United States through the number of jobs that are available. The Irish poured into the United States during the 1840s and 1850s, but once the big depression hit in 1857, the Irish stopped coming. So I feel like the free market is the best way to regulate immigration. And I think it always has been and it always will be.
You quote Peter McLoughlin’s 1829 letter home to his family in County Louth in Ireland, saying of America, “This is the best country in the world. There is no want, there is room and a living for all, but you must depend, they must Work for it.” (And he underlined the word “Work.”) Was he right?
I certainly think so. I think the United States is a great place in part because it has been a place that people from all over the world have been able to come to and become Americans, and the United States is so much stronger because of it. And the United States became so much stronger because of the Irish, despite all the things that
Americans at the time said — that the Irish would ruin America. They were wrong. Every generation of Americans has said that the newest immigrants would ruin America, and every generation was wrong about that, and I see no reason to think that that will be any different today.
