Leave No Charming, Lilting Accent Behind

People (read: The New York Times) are questioning whether Irish illegal immigrants are getting special attention:

“You’re not just some guy or some woman in the Bronx, you’re part of a movement,” [Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform chairman] Mr. [Niall] O’Dowd told the crowd of construction workers, students and nannies. He was urging them to support a piece of Senate legislation that would let them work legally toward citizenship, rather than punishing them with prison time, as competing bills would.

For months, coalitions of Latino, Asian and African immigrants from 50 countries have been championing the same measure with scant attention, even from New York’s Democratic senators. But the Irish struck out on their own six weeks ago, and as so often before in the history of American immigration policy, they have landed center stage.

Last week, when Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles E. Schumer declared their support for a new path to citizenship, and denounced criminal penalties recently passed by the House of Representatives, they did so not at the large, predominantly Hispanic immigrant march on Washington, but at the much smaller Irish rally held there the following day.

. . .

Juan Carlos Ruiz, the coordinator of the predominantly Hispanic rally of 40,000 held March 7 on Capitol Hill, said that only one senator had shown up there, without speaking: Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat. The next day, Mr. Ruiz said, when he and his 14-year-old son stopped by the Irish gathering of about 2,400 and realized that the speakers included Senators Edward M. Kennedy, John McCain, as well as Senators Clinton and Schumer, his son asked, “Why didn’t the senators come to our rally?”

“I was heartbroken,” Mr. Ruiz said. “I needed to explain to him: ‘The immigrants of color, for these senators we are not important enough for them to make a space in their calendar.'”

Still, the idea of a special Irish exception is not unwelcome:

Special visas for the Irish “would be brilliant,” said Valery O’Donnell, a house cleaner and single mother of 7-year-old twins who was at the Rory Dolan’s meeting, and said she had lived in New York illegally for 13 years. “There’s no harm in us. We’re all out here to work hard.”

Backstory: How About Instead We Try Something Along The Lines Of “No Mellifluously Cute Foreign Accent Left Behind”?, Now That’s Better.