The US Congress may have at last stumbled across a subject related to immigration it can give its consent to in a year dominated by polls — and this is rolling out red-carpet welcome to more Irish nationals. When the explosive subject of an all-inclusive immigration reform is badly stalled in a Congress, at odds with its members, reporters suggest, senators of both the involved parties are throwing their lot behind a law which would make possible nearly 10,500 Irish people to arrive on the US shores, for work purposes, per annum.
However, the involved act has been severely torn apart by critics who say it is nothing but a well-calculated trick to pocket the highly valuable votes of the strong Irish-American community. Both pro-immigration and anti-immigration bodies have also attacked the legislation claiming it to be a shining instance of blatant favoritism in the favor of the expatriates from Europe.
But, many champions of the bill strongly argue that they are only making attempts to assist turn around discrimination against Irish nationals that was unintentionally brought into existence — thanks to an overhaul of the immigration system of the US way back in 1965. Such people add that the revamp, tailored to bring to an end a bias against the refugees from Latin America, Asia and Africa, have made it much tougher for the Irish immigrants to pocket the visas, irrespective of their robust cultural relations with America.
They further say that since 1965, Asians and Hispanics have been the leading immigrant groups in the US even as they acquire citizenship their close family members get priority for US visas, as Washington DC’s commitment to family reunification.
Nearly 40 million of the US people – or nearly 13% of the population of the US which has a population of more than 313 million people – are believed to have Irish origins, while the Hispanics constitute close to 16% of the US nationals. However, the number of immigrants having Irish descents, pocketing permanent legal status in the US, has nose-dived over the years. While during the 1960s, there were close to 38,000 of such cases, between 2000 and 2009, it became just 16,000.
