| Candidate Recalls Irish Ancestors in Call
for Immigration Reform
By Beth Jamnik
America’s history is inextricably tied to the history of Irish immigrants.
The Potato Famine of 1845 brought two million Irish to America in 10 years.
They contributed to building the railroads, working farms and mining, activities
that helped build today’s America.
It was around the time that Bryan Kennedy's ancestors came to America.
Democrat Kennedy is challenging Wisconsin Congressman James Sensenbrenner
in the November, 2006, elections. Farmers in Northern Ireland, these long-ago
Kennedy relatives settled into the same occupation in Rhode Island and
south-central Pennsylvania.
"My family really became integrated into the farming community," says
Kennedy, who was raised in western Maryland about 30 miles south of where
his grandparents grew up. "They weren’t really Irish-Americans anymore;
they just became Americans."
Kennedy, who has worked on Capitol Hill and led several graduate student
government associations to lobby the House of Representatives and the Senate,
is an assistant professor of Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
As a result of redistricting, Sensenbrenner became his House representative.
Growing concerns over Sensenbrenner’s political positions led Kennedy to
challenge the man he believes no longer adequately represents the state’s
Fifth Congressional District or the needs of American families.
Sensenbrenner is a co-sponsor of the Border Protection, Antiterrorism
and Illegal Immigration Control Act, which seeks to build walls along parts
of the border, change the status of illegal immigrants to that of felons
and criminalize any American who gives aid to an undocumented worker. "It
demonstrates all the hypocrisy," says Kennedy. "The Sensenbrenner bill
is trying to create new laws, [when] nothing is being done to enforce the
current laws." This is the piece of legislation that prompted "A Day Without
Immigrants," a boycott to demonstrate the importance of undocumented workers
to the economy.
A former Republican, Kennedy has become a moderate Democrat because
he disagrees with the way Republican politicians approach certain issues.
"They’re ruining our schools, they’re ruining the environment and they
sent 2,600 men and women to die in a war we should never have gotten involved
in," he says of the Iraq conflict. "They can’t win on issues because they
know that the American people have better values than that. So they find
some hate group and rile all the anger against it. This year, immigrants
are the hate group."
Kennedy recognizes the importance of immigrants to the economy and disagrees
with Sensenbrenner’s bill as a way to control illegal immigration. His
goal is to make it easier for families to come to the United States together.
"When most of the Irish immigrants who are in the United States came—when
my ancestors came—they came as families," he says.
"But now people are in a position where dad from Mexico has to sneak
across the border because we don’t let families come up. We’ve set the
quota so low that they’ll never get here," Kennedy claims. The annual quota
is based on their immigration category and country of origin.
There are also special exceptions, such as the Diversity Immigrant Visa
Program, often referred to as the "Green Card Lottery," which makes permanent
resident visas available every year to countries with low immigration rates
to the United States. Both Ireland and Northern Ireland qualify for the
program this year, but the eligibility of countries varies each year. The
applicants from each country are selected at random, so being the first
to apply has no effect on the odds of being chosen if there are more applicants
than available visas.
Kennedy wants to eliminate this lottery system, as well as the nationality-based
quotas. "We have several countries that never reach their quota, and we
have other countries that reach their quota by the middle of January,"
he says, asking, "Why not just have it be first-come, first-served, and
we can do away with the whole lottery system?"
Rather than restricting entrance with quotas, which ultimately results
in high numbers of people crossing the borders illegally, Kennedy proposes
setting an annual cap for the total number of immigrants, regardless of
their nationalities.
According to Kennedy, if it were easier and faster for immigrants—particularly
families or those with families in America—to come into the United States,
they would be more inclined to do so legally.
"They sneak across the border and take new jobs, and they can’t complain
about working conditions, they can’t ask for raises, they have no rights
at all and they’re driving down labor costs in the United States. If we
made it easier for them to come and bring their families, we’d have more
legal immigration than we currently have."
Kennedy supports two bills that would begin to account for illegal immigrants
in the United States. The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors
(DREAM) Act would allow the children of undocumented workers to receive
conditional permanent residence that could become permanent residence if
certain conditions are met.
"The object is to help them become legal citizens," says Kennedy.
"It wasn’t their fault if, at five years old, their parents dragged them
across the border. I don’t think we should penalize the next generation."
The DREAM Act would also allow these students a chance to receive in-state
tuition.
The Safe, Orderly, Legal Visas and Enforcement (SOLVE) Act allows for
certain undocumented workers to be eligible for legalization if they can
pass a security test and demonstrate that they have been paying their taxes.
"It’s not an amnesty," says Kennedy. "It’s a fair way to keep the economy
running and give these people opportunities and a pathway to being legal."
Legalization of undocumented workers would allow them workers’ rights that
would improve wages and working conditions in the United States.
The legislation that Kennedy supports makes his stance on immigration
clear: the government needs to take responsibility for illegal immigration
in the United States. "This administration — that claims they’re doing
everything they can to keep us safe and that’s why we should keep them
in office — has let four million people across the border illegally since
George Bush became president," says Kennedy, also pointing out that the
second-largest population of undocumented workers in America are from Ireland.
"They’ve made it almost impossible for families to come to this country
together. We need to go back to what’s been our history."
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