An academic specializing in immigration has dismissed the estimate of 50,000 undocumented Irish immigrants living in the US. He calls the estimate, long cited by the US government, ‘pure invention’ with no evidence to back it up.
Dr Piaras Mac Einri made the comments to The Irish Times in the wake of similar comments by John Deasy, Waterford’s Fine Gael TD, and the Irish government’s new US envoy. Deasy cited research from the Pew Research Center and a respected demographer, suggesting that a more accurate figure was nearer to 10,000. Mac Einri, based in Cork, says that Deasy’s comments were a more or less accurate assessment of the situation.
The academic calls the 50,000 figure an example of a large and serious figure repeated so often, particularly by uncritical politicians, that it becomes seen as true, despite a lack of evidence. Mac Einri points out that undocumented Irish immigration in the wake of 9/11 has been considerably lower than the 1990s level, and that many of those immigrants either regularized or returned to Ireland on their own.
Mac Einri was on the team responsible for conducting the EMIGRE project across 2012 and 2013, the first attempt to conduct a representative national survey about emigration in Ireland, and is a migration studies lecturer at University College, Cork. The Washington-based independent research organization, the Migration Policy Institute, has long held that there are fewer than 16,000 Irish undocumented immigrants in the US.