Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

CAREER JOURNAL: “Ireland Taps U.S. to Fill Need for Skilled Workers: With an influx of IT firms, Ireland is finding it hard to recruit enough skilled workers,” by Lauren Tara LaCapra, Wall Street Journal, 31 October 2006, p. B4.

All those decades of being Europe’s “niggers”: too stupid, too lazy, too full of drink and religion and fight, with kids popping out non-stop. The Irish were so long derided as unsalvageable non-whites (both in Europe and America through the early decades of the 20th century), that it’s pretty hilarious to watch how the “Emerald Tiger” now becomes a magnet for people wanting a better life, to include the first-ever influx of Africans (which has got to freak the Irish out like crazy).

Hell, even as recently as when my wife and I lived in the Southie/Quincy area of Boston in the mid-to-late 1980s, the classic image was of the dirt-poor Irish bricklayer, his wife, and their kids all crammed into a small apartment, barely getting by and spending as much time dodging the INS as the IRS. I know, we had a wonderful such couple and their cute-as-a-button daughter living right next door to us in the Wollaston neighborhood. But naturally, they didn’t stay for long. Moving up rather quickly, they were gone in a year, only to be replaced by the next family.

But all that seems so nostalgic now. Ireland’s outward flow of humanity, the social element that defined the nation for roughly two centuries, now falls by the wayside with all this economic development. Immigration into Ireland surpasses that outward flow in the mid 1990s. Now, four times as many come in as leave, and Ireland is forced to lure our IT talent to their shores.

Aye, they’re after me lucky charms, I tell ya!

But a clear sign of the New Core status of long-suffering Ireland. As I wrote in BFA, when young Americans start looking at your land as the land of opportunity, you’re in the club baby!