COLUMN: When returning home is an ‘all or nothing’ decision for Kildare emigrants

I had no real experience of America beyond the mainstream, until I arrived in a place called Camden, North Philadelphia, last week. 

I was making a bad effort of getting to a small town called Millville in New Jersey. I was travelling there to cover the story of Naas race-car driver James Roe and this required travelling from New York through Camden to make a bus connection. 

Until very recently, and unbeknownst to me, this place was America’s murder and crime capital and in 2018 the welcome was stark.

Apartments boarded up or burnt out, people passed out, or whooshing themselves along the pavement on their backsides, lives so broken and so far beyond the mainstream that never did the land of opportunity feel like more of a misnomer.

And after ditching the bus connection idea and escaping to Millville by Uber, I started wondering about the Irish beyond the mainstream in America.

Because, the previous day, I’d been mooching about New York, where again, I’d never any reason to consider undocumented emigrants from Kildare living and working there. 

That was until I met some and heard their stories.

They too had grown up on Different Strokes, the Cosby Show, Hill Street Blues and the received wisdom that America was emigration’s best success story, once upon a time.

The Bronx. 

Queens. 

Yonkers.

We’re all familiar with these names because of those programmes and, also, because they’ve always been go-to places for Irish emigrants, long before Australia and Canada moved up the charts.

But America, pre-9/11 and before, was a place more easily accessed and a place of greater choice, whereas the modern undocumented emigrant is the one that can’t go home for fear of not getting back in. 

Of course, this isn’t new. Northing in this is revelatory. 

But hearing accounts of lives now lived under greater restrictions because of the Trump administration, and hearing it from Kildare people, did bring a new focus to the chapter of emigration that started around 2008.

It’s a story with a light touch when it comes to America. 

This makes sense considering there’s no visa scheme and half of Homeland Security are camped at the airports. 

But if emigration is about taking a punt into the unknown, then America, minus the right papers, remains either a ballsy choice or a poorly considered one. 

On one level, some part of me feels affronted by the reality that educated Kildare emigrants are living restricted lives in the land of the free.

 Though at the same time, this doesn’t necessarily translate into having bad lives. 

Anecdotally at least, it sounded like an economically and socially prosperous experience, and the fact remains that just being Irish is enough to reduce the city into a grid of of helpful networks. 

There is an un-Kildare network, of course, and the hospitality and construction sectors remain robust employment prospects. 

In terms of that Kildare perspective, the people I encountered had cash and time, but feel increasingly limited as to where they can their spend time off and what they can spend their money on.

In a life where your electronic footprint increases by the day, it was almost novel to hear of lives carried by cash transactions and people therefore remaining ‘off grid’. 

Living in London, I could never call myself an emigrant when measured against these experiences. 

These are lives that don’t pop in and out of the country on cheap flights. Their choice is a thing of permanence. 

And there’s an acceptance that their decision means they’ll endure limited choice for as long as they say.

Be it New York, or London, so many emigrant lives made difficult by leaving have shored up along a bar counter, so it was inspiring to hear stories of Kildare people forging ahead and sidelining this outlet. 

So would they live in Ireland again, in Kildare again? 

They don’t know, some said. 

Maybe, others said. 

But the thing is, many of them have been away so long that they can’t know for certain what Ireland and Kildare looks like in 2018. 

It’s kinda like Camden, New Jersey, in that you really need to go there to get  a real sense of it. 

But I’m still getting my head around the idea that sampling home again, reconnecting with all that was once familiar, is an ‘all or nothing’ decision for some local emigrants in the year 2018. 

Robert Mulhern is a London based journalist contracted to RTE's The Documentary on One. To contact our columnist, email [email protected]