This is an article I wrote for my site about Coffin Ships and the Potato Famine:

http://www.irishamericanjournal.com/2017/08/coffin-ships.html

"In 1958 in his book 'A Nation of Immigrants,' John F. Kennedy wrote about the significance of immigration to America. He quoted a passage from the American poet Walt Whitman, who felt the United States was a special place precisely because it welcomed a diversity of people from many lands. Walt Whitman wrote, 'These States are the amplest poem, Here is not merely a nation but a teeming Nation of nations.

"In the 1840s the Irish became a part of America’s 'Nation of nations.' The Irish did not come to America because of the potato; they came because of politics." 

 http://www.irishamericanjournal.com/2017/08/coffin-ships.html ;

See more on my website at http://www.irishamericanjournal.com/

Thank you,

Adrian McGrath