They come by the thousands — Irish students on work visas, many flocking to the West Coast to work in summer jobs by day and to enjoy the often raucous life in a college town at night.
But the work-visa program that allowed for the exchanges has in recent years become not just a source of aspiration, but also a source of embarrassment for Ireland, marked by a series of high-profile episodes involving drunken partying and the wrecking of apartments in places like San Francisco and Santa Barbara.
More than 150,000 Irish students have used the program for J-1 visas to visit the United States in the past 50 years, including 8,000 last summer, officials said.
Cahir O’Doherty, the arts and culture editor of The Irish Voice, wrote a column in 2014 expressing distress at “the callous destruction unleashed by these loaded Irish students” of a house rented in the Sunset District of San Francisco.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/ba ... .html?_r=1
I appreciate them coming here to do the shit-work Californians don't want to do, but it's getting a little out of control. I'm starting to wish we had the Mexicans back. When they're drunk they just pass out, instead of trying to fight and break crap.
Or that we could develop high-level robotic technology so we didn't have to keep importing people.
