When I was a child living at 55 Homes Ave., one block over from our present home on Longfellow Street, my family were members of St. Peter’s parish, which had a congregation of about 22,000, almost all of them Irish Catholics like us.

The Irish have long memories. Many of us are descended from those who left the Emerald Isle during and after the Great Hunger, aka the Potato Famine, which began in 1845. That horror was the result of the English conquest and domination of Ireland after which the Irish were forced off the most productive land to the rocky edges of the island where almost nothing grew, except the potato.

The potato’s ability to grow in otherwise inhospitable soil, its nutritional combination of carbohydrates and protein, made it the salvation of the native Irish, especially in the west and south. During the famine years (1845-1849), when a blight caused the failure of the potato crop across Europe, the British overlords profitably shipped abundant wheat harvests from Ireland oversees to their imperial subjects in India instead of feeding the starving “[N-word]s of Europe,” as they dubbed the Irish.

After the conquest of Ireland, the British government handed over to English landlords many enormous estates that were made up of small villages. During the famine, it was cheaper to ship entire villages of Irish peasants oversees rather than feed them. These starving, desperate people formed the majority of the 2.1 million who left Ireland between 1845 and 1855. The troublesome poor were shipped off in what were called “coffin ships” because of the enormous number of passengers who, in packed conditions, perished from disease and starvation on the voyages to destinations like Boston.

Gov. DeSantis of Florida and Gov. Abbott of Texas have revived the practice of shipping people off to unsuspecting destinations, much as the British did to the Irish 170 or so years ago. These modern human traffickers don’t use “coffin ships,” but the intent is the same and Boston is once again a destination. The passengers from Texas are being removed and sent to distant places with no regard for the damage to their families, their lives, their aspirations, their plans, or their rights to due process.

The British in the mid-nineteenth century did not choose the obvious solution to starvation: Feed the Irish with the plentiful harvests on the island. The Republican governors of 2022 do not choose the obvious solution for their states: Reform US immigration policies.

The British traffickers used Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” economic theory to explain their refusal to act humanely. For the governors of Texas and Florida, “cruelty is the point,” as Adam Serwer explained recently in The Atlantic.:

As early as 1729, Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal (For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick) offered the solution to hunger among the Irish: “A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”

Let’s hope that neither DeSantis nor Abbott has read Swift.