Reply #52: Uh huh, right.

[Spider Jerusalem]

not buying it.

Irish and Italian immigrants were subject to discrimination on the basis of anti-Catholic prejudice more than anything else. And the reason that a lot of those people couldn't get anything better than menial jobs is because most of them had no skills to do anything else. I say this as someone whose great-great-grandfather came to America from Ireland, during the potato famine...and he was a schoolteacher, not a menial labourer (so much for 'unacceptable for employment').

You can't really compare four hundred years of slavery and Jim Crow to the Irish or Italian experience in America; you just CAN'T. It's ridiculous to even TRY to do that.