The tide of talk of refugees and boats and immigration and politicians holding refugees hostage for political capital having overwhelmed me recently, I went back to the old annals of my family, kept meticulously by my oldest brother, who recently digitised and webbed them, so that the family can access not only fact but photographs and film snippets of the Old Ones reminiscing, and I am reminded that I am the great-grandchild of immigrants, and so are you. We forget this, and it seems to me that we ought not to forget this.
On the one side my people came to America from County Clare, where they lived by the sea and eked out livings until my great-grandmother rose so high as to run a ferry between Ireland and England; a ferry used most often, I suspect, to escort exiles from Ireland to England, rather than the other way round.
On the other side my people came to America from County Wicklow, where they lived in the mountains and eked out livings which included, as my father has often noted with a smile, many years, perhaps centuries, as village seanachies, the storycatchers of old Ireland, charged with remembering and sharing stories — a crucial job, with hints and intimations of moral responsibility, although my dad, grinning, prefers to say that we have always been paid liars; as he says we have a natural gift for it and if we had only been more venal we could have sunk to being a powerful political dynasty in America, like the Bushes and the Kennedys.
A scientist friend of mine here is involved in a recent discovery that there appear to have been at least three major influxes of immigrants to North America, ten or more thousand years ago. His particular expertise is what he calls maritime strays, the evidence of additional immigrants landing along the Pacific shore thousands of years ago. Not even the First Peoples here were not immigrants, as he says — an interesting phrase to remember when the shrill arguments about who should be allowed to live here and who should not grow bitter and violent.
The same principle is true of Australia, of course, though on a far more remarkable timeline;