Hispanic Immigrants Will Transform America Just Like the Irish Did:

By Geraldo Rivera

Published March 26, 2011

FoxNews.com

The extraordinary revelations from the 2010 census that the nation’s Hispanic population has surged to historic levels has understandably alarmed some fearful that the country is changing too fast, too furiously. For the first time in modern world history, a major nation is changing color right before the eyes of its residents.

I argue the transformation will help renew and replenish the country, and let me add what I said on "Fox and Friends" Friday morning: America has been here before.

It happened in the middle of the 19th century at exactly the time we were going west, defeating Mexico, suppressing the tribes and fulfilling our manifest destiny. Hundreds of thousands of illegal, that is, undocumented -- unsanctioned, and uninvited -- immigrants, mostly Catholic, many from Germany, but many more from Ireland, poured into American cities up and down the East Coast.

In the case of the Irish, they were driven from home by poverty, aggravated by the disastrous potato famine of 1847-48 and exacerbated by chronic, severe oppression by the English rulers and ruling class.

This giant surge of men, women and children abandoned their stricken homeland. Entire cities, villages and towns were deserted in the Old Country and a questing, undaunted and desperate community of refugees came ashore en mass in New World cities like New York, Boston, Charleston, Savannah and, to a lesser extent, New Orleans.

In those two years alone, a staggering 650,000 Irish men women and children arrived in New York, in a historic instant becoming almost a third of the city’s population. By 1850, the Irish made up 43 percent of the city’s foreign-born.

[b]One reaction to the tsunami of Irish was the rise of militant anti-Catholic gangster/activists like William “Bill the Butcherâ€