OVER the past ten years, an increasing number of Americanist historians have suggested that Irish and other European immigrants, in an attempt to secure the prosperity and social position that their white skin had not guaranteed them in Europe, lobbied for white racial status in America. The success of this effort was by no means assured. While American laws concerning who could immigrate, be naturalized, and be enslaved accepted Irish people's pale skin color and European roots as evidence of their white racial pedigree, the discrimination that Irish immigrants experienced on the job, and the simian caricatures they saw of themselves in the newspapers, suggested that they were "racially" inferior to white Anglo-Americans and thus somehow n
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