Irish immigration at the millennium: A place of one’s own

By Patrick Markey

and Harry Keaney

For most immigrants, a major step toward settling in the U.S. is purchasing a home. With home-ownership in Ireland among the highest in the world, the desire to own a place of one’s own is particularly strong among Irish immigrants — though not always easily fulfilled.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that Irish immigrants with the financial means have been taking advantage of recent record low interest rates by buying their own homes.

Eamonn Dornan, of the Emerald Isle Immigration Center, in New York, said that purchasing a house is very much tangible evidence of a psychological turning point in deciding to stay in the U.S.

"After about five years, for people who have their career together or have a business, the next step is buying a house," he said. "And people who have kids have to start investigating schools and looking more closely at their neighborhood. That usually triggers the question of where they’re going to settle."

"People who have an inkling to stay in the U.S. and can afford it are buying a house," said Pat Duffy, a financial planner in New York. "The Irish seem to have a huge emotional attachment to ownership. Married people are more inclined to buy than singles, and many feel that rent is money down the drain."

Sean O’Sullivan, a mortgage broker with Arlington Financial in Yonkers, said Irish immigrants have been steadily purchasing their own homes since the early 1990s. "It’s been steady with us for about seven years," O’Sullivan said. "As soon as people got legalized, they started coming out of the woodwork, and the money they were sending home, they were bringing it back here and buying houses."

Kieran O’Sullivan of the Irish Immigration Center in Boston said that a problem for immigrants in buying a house, even for those who are legal, is not having established a credit history. "They get turned down because they don’t have established long-term credit," he said.

There is also the belief among some immigrants that buying a house in the U.S. actually makes it easier to return to Ireland. If things do not work out, they have a home to return to in the U.S., the theory goes.

But Duffy warns that people should not to sell their house in the U.S. until they have spent six months, and preferably a year, back in Ireland.