> > He talks a lot about some of the
> >anti-immigration policies that had sprung up
> >directed at certain groups, and
> >discrimination in America. He makes a lot of
> >challenging points-he says that Irish
> >Americans of today would quite possibly
> >react the same way to the group that
> >immigrated over as Americans of that day
> >did.
>
> But again I don't get it. What was so different
> about the Irish immigrants that made them so
> much more detestable to established citizens
> than say, Russian immigrants, or Germans,
> or Dutch?

I think it was mostly because there were a *lot* of Irish immigrants in a relatively short period of time. This reaction tends to happen when there's a huge influx of one particular group to a particular area.