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In No Irish Need Apply: A Myth of Victimization, Richard Jensen argues that 19th century job discrimination against Irish-Americans, symbolized by the idea of signs reading “No Irish Need Apply” (NINA) hanging in business windows, was largely a myth. Nearly everyone in America remembers learning about the discrimination Irish immigrants faced during their early years in America, and the NINA signs are an essential part of that narrative. However, in his thorough research that included combing through both newspaper ads and records of firsthand accounts, Jensen convincingly shows that there is no evidence these signs were at all common. Instead, Jensen convincingly presents us with a narrative in which NINA signs were somewhat common in private British homes seeking maids, and that the collective memory of those signs and their significance as a slogan of general distaste for the Irish carried on into the 19th century United States. (409) He then discusses how John Poole’s song spread the line even further, causing the people to believe the phrase really was printed up in many businesses and also giving the phrase a special status as a rallying cry of oppression for the Irish to bond over. (409) Jensen uses economic arguments and later statistics to assert that the Irish were not discriminated against and in fact were sought after as cheap labor, a common experience of any immigrant group entering a workforce en masse without many skills. (413)
The part of Jensen’s argument that most interested me was something I alluded to in the last paragraph: the idea that the Irish used the idea of NINA and a general sense of discrimination as a way to strengthen their sense of community in the face of what they saw as economic discrimination. Jensen claims numerous times that this tight-knit Irish community encouraged individual Irish from taking jobs dominated by the “Other.” (Presumably, this means other immigrants and Yankees). Jensen believes this was a useful tool for the community as the Irish were able to dominate certain professions such as the canal building and longshoremen industries. (412) Their numbers thus allowed them more power as workers and allowed them to negotiate with employers and organize strikes in a unified fashion. On the face of it, it seems counterintuitive to say that the Irish community could play up discrimination against themselves and use it as an economic tool, but Jensen makes it into a logical, economic argument. Immigrant groups, and really any minority or otherwise disadvantaged groups, are at their most powerful when they act collectively and act to better conditions for the entire group. If Irish workers were constantly going into the same professions, then their numbers would give them a greater collective power as workers within those professions.
If I had one issue with the article, it would be the same that Eli brought up in his post. I think that Jensen could have done a better job of including narratives that illustrated how Irish people of the time actually felt. Perhaps diaries, letter correspondences, or Irish newspapers or pamphlets could have given insight into ways they felt American society mistreated them. I appreciated Jensen’s statistical, more logic-based argument, but when evaluating an immigrant group in this way it is important to consider their own experiences as they themselves perceived them.