By NiallO’Dowd

PHILADELPHIA — At about 7:30 last Friday evening some 250 people crammed into the ballroom of a local hotel to listen to the latest news on undocumented immigrants and the chances for visas for the Irish.

The Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform (ILIR), the new organization dedicated to helping legalize the Irish, was in town, and similar to elsewhere the Irish were turning out in big numbers.

The crowd was much larger than expected. Local organizers had thought about 100 would be present. A similar meeting in the Bronx/Yonkers area two weeks ago attracted over 1,000 people, though only about half got inside the banquet room at Rory Dolan’s.

In the weeks to come more meetings will be held in Boston, San Francisco, Queens and, on Wednesday, March 8, a lobbying day in Washington D.C. ILIR organizers know it is an uphill task to secure working visas, but the support level has been such that the chances of doing so have certainly improved in recent weeks.

It is clear now that the reality of illegal immigration for the Irish in 2006 is much different than what it was during the push for the Donnelly and Morrison visas.

Back then there was a huge influx from Ireland over a short period in the mid-1980s when the Irish economy was foundering. The undocumented pool was overwhelmingly young, not long here and their presence could hardly be missed.

These days it is more an accumulation of undocumented over a number of years. The people at the ILIR meetings are older than those at the Irish Immigration Reform Movement meetings back in the late 1980s.

What has clearly happened is that there has been a slow but steady buildup of undocumented since the early 1990s when the Morrison and Donnelly visas expired. Since then there has been a stream rather than a flood of undocumented from Ireland who have come to the U.S. every year.

Thus, very many of our undocumented today are well settled and established in America. They have built homes, family lives and, in many cases, created employment. Their lives are here, and many have been resident over a decade.

Since September 11, however, they have been caught in the maw of the trap that being undocumented has become. Up until then it was still possible to slip back home, to have a driver’s license, to essentially live the life of an everyday American. The crackdown since September 11, however, has made that next to impossible.

Many of those in Philadelphia I spoke with were living examples of that. They love this country, they’ve prospered here and, like generations of Irish before them, they are contributing greatly to the economy and communities they live in.

Tom Connaughton, head of the local Irish Emigrant Advice Center, spoke movingly of the people he has come to know very well. The crackdown has been devastating for them.

One young woman with a small baby told me how her greatest wish was to bring her new child home to her parents in Ireland who were too elderly to travel. That was now impossible and her only option seemed to be to move her family back home lock stock and barrel — and give up the successful life she and her husband had built up in Philadelphia. There were many variations on the same story.

Unlike previous generations, however, such Irish today are now permanently outside the system, destined to remain so unless something can be done.

That is the great challenge that the Irish community faces. This St. Patrick’s Day there will be many other issues such as Northern Ireland to the forefront, not to mention acres of green beer and shamrougery, but there is none more vital than this one for this community.

There is now a window of opportunity over the next few weeks and months to make our voices heard on this issue. From New York to California we need to do so. Elsewhere in this newspaper there are details on how to contact ILIR and a list of the meetings that are going to be held.

In the words of the old Irish proverb Ni Neart go Chur Le Cheile (No strength unless in unity), Philadelphia and New York have shown the way. It is time to follow.