Could it be that those who killed the immigration reform bill in Washington, D.C. last week were actually wrapping up an Independence Day gift for the nation’s many immigrants?

Consider the U.S. senator who wrote a book celebrating his Irish immigrant ancestors, who nevertheless played a key role in sinking the latest immigration bill.

In a way, such a contradiction makes perfect sense. As we celebrate the events of July 4, 1776, this week, let’s also remember the events of July 6, 1798. That is when the latest in a series on anti-immigrant bills known as the Alien and Sedition Acts was passed in Washington. (Hey, at least they passed something.)

The late 1790s was a time of revolt in France and Ireland. These revolutionary minded (not to mention Catholic) nations were likely to bring their incendiary, Papist ideas to our shores, many felt. Never mind that the U.S. itself revolted against the Brits just 22 years earlier.

Please, forgive my sarcasm. Most immigrants feel rotten that their status remains the same.

But we should not be surprised. America’s attitude towards immigration has always been deeply conflicted.

Consider freshman Democratic Senator James Webb of Virginia, one of the most vivid symbols of the tortured debate process which resulted in the end, for now, of the immigration debate.

Webb was one of several new Democratic senators who did not go along with party stars such as Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Had Webb and three or four other senators been won over, the bill might have passed. But Webb feared a yes vote would upset too many of his constituents who see this as “amnesty.”

Webb, incidentally, is the author on Born Fighting, a critically-acclaimed celebration of the Scots-Irish tradition in the U.S. These immigrants, Webb argues in his book, changed America.

“(The Scots-Irish) people gave our country great things, including its most definitive culture,” he writes. “Its bloodlines have flowed in the veins of at least a dozen presidents, and in many of our greatest soldiers. It created and still perpetuates the most distinctly American form of music.

“It is imbued with a unique and unforgiving code of personal honor, less ritualized but every bit as powerful as the samurai code. Its legacy is broad, in many ways defining the attitudes and values of the military, or working-class America, and even the peculiarly populist form of American democracy itself.”

Maybe Webb’s no vote was precisely the way to at least allow immigrants to quietly contribute to the American way. By choosing not to reform the current immigration mess, the system at least goes on as it was before.

And so, we still have this problem with the Irish (and Mexicans and all others), just as we did 209 years ago, when numerous Irish immigrants were rounded up under the Alien and Sedition Acts. One of them was an elected congressman, Matthew Lyon, whose crime was criticizing President John Adams and sympathizing with French revolutionaries.

Similar charges were levied against four Irish immigrants in Phila-

delphia. Even in the 1790s, it was known that the U.S. party in power (the Federalists) was targeting immigrants in part because they were welcomed by the opposition party (today’s Democrats).

But the whole plan backfired. The Federalists were soon tossed from power and by 1828, a Democrat and son of Irish immigrants, Andrew Jackson, was in the White House. That’s the kind of the Scots Irish guy Webb wrote about and celebrated.

A few years after Jackson’s election, a political machine known as Tammany Hall consolidated immigrant political power in a way never before seen.

So, those Alien and Sedition Acts really didn’t work out they way they were supposed to. Perhaps, a few decades from now, we’ll be glad this immigrant debate played out the way it did.

Until then, this holiday, let us celebrate Nigeria’s Rotimi Adebari and John Dunlap. The former is the newly elected, Nigerian immigrant mayor of Portlaoise Town Council in Ireland.

The latter is the Tyrone-born immigrant whose company printed the first copies of the American Declaration of Inde-

pendence 231 years ago this week.

(Contact Tom at tomdeignan@verizon.net)