Bluesky

When Donald Trump invoked the 227-year-old Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members this weekend, I had only one association with the law: when the Federalists originally passed it to fight an influx of foreigners into the new nation who might align with their enemies. And chief among them were my people, Irish Catholics.

I’ve written many times before that Irish Catholics, sadly, have been disproportionately represented in the modern American backlash against freedom and equality, despite their own ancestors’ starting out among the lowest of the low here. I wrote a whole book trying to make this case, and I believe I failed. The illegal invocation of this law ought to, if anything could, make Irish Catholics remember their origins. I doubt that it will; I can’t help trying.

The Federalists passed the act in 1798 not merely out of ethnic prejudice against Irish Catholics, although that was certainly a factor. They wanted to keep out French revolutionists, as well as the Irish they’d supported in the failed Irish uprising of 1798. The party believed both groups, each heavily Catholic, were enemies of the barely established American experiment. They also believed they’d vote to support the Democratic-Republican Party, a precursor to the modern Democratic Party.

So the Alien Enemies Act also represented an 18th-century version of the Great Replacement Theory. The more populist Democratic-Republicans denounced the act as inciting a “reign of terror.”

But the rhetoric against the Irish was particularly horrific.

Federalist Representative Harrison Grey Otis proclaimed in Congress: “[I do] not wish to invite hoards of wild Irishmen, nor the turbulent and disorderly of all parts of the world, to come here with a view to disturb our tranquility, after having succeeded in the overthrow of their own government.”

Of course, the Irish didn’t succeed in overthrowing the British fully until the 1998 Easter Sunday Accords 200 years later, another nice rhyme of history.

After the law passed, Federalists regularly rounded up, or sparred with, Irish Americans thought or known to be sympathetic to the 1798 rebellion of the United Irishmen against England. Increasingly, Irish Catholic Philadelphia erupted as both sides squared off against their domestic enemy.

Since then, the act has only been used during wartime—the War of 1812 and World Wars I and II. It is completely lawless for Trump to use it now, but what else is new?

Just one last word for Irish Catholics, on this St. Patrick’s Day, about why they have to stop siding with oligarchy against the rest of us, and also, most of them. The great Irish writer Fintan O’Toole has a new review of another fantastic book on the Irish famine, or An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger. Rot, by historian Padraic X. Scanlan, adds to the scholarship that makes clear that the Great Hunger wasn’t exactly genocide, as in a planned eradication of a people, but rather a ratcheting up of capitalist ideology and cruelty as applied to the Irish poor.

To many British political and religious leaders, the famine was God’s message that the lazy behavior of the Irish had to be stopped, and channeled into hard-working obedience to capitalism. It was a way of imposing market discipline and cruelty on the Irish, who seemed to only cultivate what they could eat from the land they stewarded, but sadly didn’t own, and then enjoy their (very short) lives.

Of course, most landowners were English or Scottish Protestants handed Irish land in the “plantation” era. They were either absentee landlords or occasional visitors. They preferred using their land for gorgeous flower gardens or to graze cattle. The Irish Catholics almost exclusively rented small plots of land, and often wound up giving over their whole crop yield as rent to their wealthy landlords, way before the famine.

Beyond that abomination, though, the British charged with trying to ameliorate the Great Hunger instead saw it as an opportunity to oust those small tenants from their land, and teach them discipline. They created workhouses, which served a dual purpose: to get the lazy Irish “working,” in mostly cruel make-work situations, and to simultaneously clear them from their land, so it could be cultivated in the most lucrative way, according to the principles of mid-19th-century capitalist farming.