Aliens of Extraordinary Ability: Two Irish Girls Who Made It to New York

Maeve Higgins, Dec. 30, 2016 - "I came here on an O-­1 visa — I’m an alien of extraordinary ability. That ability is doing comedy and persuading friends who do voice­overs in cartoons to write letters to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, vouching for me. Annie was an unaccompanied minor without documents and she sailed right in. I think about her, and me, and the people who were simply born here, and the people who die trying to get here, and the people who have lived here since childhood, who are American in every way save paperwork, but without any path to citizenship. I mean, the sheer dumb luck involved in it all! I try to make sense of it in a podcast in which I interview a new person each week about their immigration story. ... Annie Moore never made a fortune, or wrote a book, or invented a computer, and why should she? Why should immigrants be deemed extraordinary to deserve a place at the table? She did enough. She was just one woman who lived a short life, a hard one. And she lives on today, not just in her descendants. She lives on in every girl arriving from a country shot through with rebellion and hunger, and in every immigrant that gives America her humanity."