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Re: Enos Schera's article In Memory Of My Grandson: Reflections On Reclaiming Florida

From: An Irish University Graduate [Email him]

I am writing in response to Mr. Schera's article, where he mentions that his grandson committed suicide because he could not get a job in Miami.

As an Irish university graduate, this had a special resonance for me. This is the worst recession in years and I cannot get any job. It's not a matter of me refusing to flip burgers or clean toilets. It's that no one will hire me to do so. Almost everyone I know is in the same boat.

And yet everywhere I go there are foreigners doing these jobs. Apparently I, and my fellow Irish twenty-somethings, are not willing to do those jobs. We just keep applying for them for the hell of it.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that I am a burden to my family, to my community and to my country as a whole. The government clearly does not want me here if they are importing huge numbers of cheap foreign workers. My fellow citizens clearly don't need me if they allow it to happen, and keep hiring these people. It's becoming harder to keep trying and, in all honesty, suicide has crossed my mind more than once.

Irish people keep talking about the need to be compassionate to asylum seekers and economic migrants. They never explain why their needs and desires should take precedence over those of Irish people. I just want to work. Emigration seems inevitable, but I want to stay in my country and I don't want to become part of the problem in some other country.

I offer my condolences to Mr. Schera. For what it's worth, it made me feel less alone.