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I worked for Irish contractors that used to import Irish labor to work on Britain’s roads and construction sites; the most famous was Murphy’s and it was a brutal place to work many Irish workers told me. The poem went like this:
“You never work for Murphy’s McAlpine or John Laing
For they’ll have you behind the mixer doggin’ In the sand.”
When I lived in London one of the famous Irish pubs that came to mind was The Elephant’s Head in Camden Town. I was in Camden with Roger Martinez and we were outside that pub but I never went in and it’s a much trendier area now I think.
And this Irish guy I worked with used to say all the time, “The craic is good in Cricklewood, where glasses are crackin’ amd Paddy is Jackin’” Jackin refers to quiting your job. Also, when I left England, the NHS was being saved by immigrant doctors in particular. Many English doctors left for the US where medicine is a business and having your own practice is such a prestigious accomplishment. I do recall lots of Irish women as nurses too but never realized the depth of Irish female immigration. My own great grandparents on both sides came from Ireland. Richard Mellor
When people picture the Irish who went to Britain, they picture a man with a shovel.
Here's what the numbers actually say. For much of the twentieth century, more Irish women emigrated than Irish men. Between 1946 and 1951, for every hundred Irish women who left, only seventy-three men did.
And a huge number of those women went into one job.
Britain founded the NHS in 1948, and immediately discovered it couldn't staff it.
So they came recruiting. Advertisements went into the Irish national and provincial papers. On 6 August 1949, the Connaught Telegraph ran a notice telling readers that a recruitment officer named Miss Lavelle would be touring the region in the coming weeks — Ballina, Westport, Castlebar, Claremorris.
Through the 1950s and 60s, NHS staff travelled all over Ireland, took rooms in local hotels, and interviewed teenage girls for nurse training.
The offer was simple and it was enormous. Training in Ireland was limited and expensive. In Britain it was free, and it came with a bed in the nurses' home. For a seventeen-year-old from a farm in Mayo with no money, that was a life.
Thousands went.
The scale is staggering. By the 1960s, eleven percent of every nurse recruited to hospitals in the south-east of England had been born in the Irish Republic. By 1971 there were 31,000 Irish-born nurses in Britain — twelve percent of the entire nursing workforce.
At one Liverpool hospital, of 641 recruits over those years, 350 were from Ireland. Just over 38 percent were English. Several of the Irish nurses interviewed later said the English were a minority in their own training class.
One of them described it plainly: they were the backbone of the NHS.
They were seventeen and eighteen years old, a long way from home, homesick, and everybody called them Paddy no matter how often they protested.
A Sligo woman named Nessa, who started training in Yorkshire in 1957, put it simply years later — the hospitals would have been short an awful lot of staff if the Irish nurses hadn't been there.
The men who built Britain got a ballad.
The women who kept it alive got nothing at all.
Was your mother, your aunt or your grandmother one of them? Which hospital?
I don’t particularly want to get serious on a Saturday night, but the bellends in Dover have p***ed me off. Watching a bunch of numpties in balaclavas block roads, intimidate people and then lecture everyone else about who is supposedly threatening British values is just f***ing ridiculous. The hypocrisy would be funny if the whole thing wasn’t so ugly.
Half my ancestors were Litvak Jews. Around 90–95% of that community was murdered by the Nazis. Britain was one of the places people could flee to, and the fact that this country offered refuge from persecution is something we ought to be proud of.
So watching masked men complain that Muslim women shouldn’t be allowed to cover their faces is f***ing absurd. Complaining that Muslims are “intimidating” while standing in the road in balaclavas intimidating strangers isn’t patriotism. It’s hypocrisy.
And underneath all of this is the oldest trick going: persuade people with very little that their problems are caused by people with even less. Fill their feeds with rage about migrants, Muslims and refugees, and they’ll spend their time punching down instead of looking up.
These guys aren’t rebels. They’re sheep. They are a dream come true for extremely rich and powerful people who would much rather have ordinary people raging at penniless migrants than asking awkward questions about wealth, tax, power and who is actually running the country.
If they genuinely think Britain’s problems are being caused by the people arriving here with virtually nothing, they haven’t seen through the system.
I have written about Alexia Palmer many times. The first time was in 2016, when she had the pluck to do something few seventeen-year-old immigrant models would have dared to do. She went up against Donald Trump’s modeling company and demanded the money she said she had been promised.
Ten years later, I am still asking questions about her.
Not Jeffrey Epstein. Not photographs of Trump at parties. Not guilt by association. Trump Model Management. Donald Trump’s company. Alexia Palmer’s experience. The immigration documents. The money.
Palmer was recruited in Jamaica when she was seventeen years old. Trump Model Management brought her to the United States through the H-1B visa program. According to court documents reviewed by Reuters, the agency represented in connection with her visa that she would receive at least $75,000 per year for three years.
Palmer said that was not remotely what happened.
She alleged that after three years with Trump Model Management, she received only a few thousand dollars after commissions, expenses and other deductions. ABC reported that the agency took roughly 80 percent of her earnings in expenses and fees and obtained only 21 shoots for her during those three years. Her visa also meant she could not simply walk across town and work for another employer while remaining legally employed in the United States. Palmer described the experience herself in brutal language: she said she felt “like a slave.”
Think about the power relationship here.
A seventeen-year-old girl is recruited in Jamaica by an American modeling company owned by one of the wealthiest and most famous men in the United States. The company participates in bringing her across an international border under an employer-sponsored visa. Immigration paperwork represents employment worth $75,000 a year. She arrives in New York dependent upon that employment arrangement and later says that virtually none of the money she expected ever reached her.
Somebody should have investigated this as possible labor trafficking and exploitation of a foreign minor.
That is the part I am no longer interested in saying politely.
Trafficking does not require somebody chained in the back of a truck. Federal labor-trafficking law concerns obtaining labor through force, fraud or coercion. Whether Palmer’s circumstances satisfied every element of a trafficking offense is precisely the kind of question an actual investigation could have examined.
Where was that investigation?
Instead, Palmer attempted to fight Trump Model Management through civil litigation. Her complaint alleged violations involving wage law, immigration law, fraud, breach of contract, unjust enrichment, conversion and RICO.
People sometimes dispose of this story with four words:
“She sued and lost.”
That is an extraordinarily misleading description of what happened.
There was no trial. There was no jury. Palmer never received an evidentiary hearing in which she took the stand, Trump Model Management’s representatives took the stand, witnesses were cross-examined, the competing accounts were tested and a finder of fact determined what actually happened to her.
Judge Analisa Torres dismissed the federal lawsuit at the pleading stage. On Palmer’s labor claim connected to the H-1B program, the court ruled that she had failed to exhaust the administrative process through the Department of Labor and therefore could not pursue that claim in federal court. Other claims were dismissed because the court concluded that Palmer had not sufficiently alleged or supported the legal elements necessary for those particular causes of action.
The underlying facts were never adjudicated at trial.
That distinction matters.
Nobody heard Palmer testify and then found her testimony false. No jury examined all the evidence and declared Trump Model Management innocent of exploiting her. No evidentiary hearing tested the entire story and produced a factual finding that everything described by Palmer had been legitimate.
The lawsuit was dismissed.
The questions were not.
Palmer did what the judge said the H-1B process required. She went to the Department of Labor. Bloomberg Law reported in April 2016 that her attorney confirmed she was continuing the fight there. Later reporting indicated that the Labor Department complaint was also dismissed and that Palmer was appealing that decision.
Then something else happens to the Alexia Palmer story.
It goes quiet.
Very quiet.
I have been looking for this woman for years. I have followed leads. I have searched the internet and social media. I have written about her repeatedly. I have contacted people who have resources and political reach far beyond mine, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others, hoping someone would take an interest in finding her and determining what happened after those proceedings.
My writings on this subject have reached substantial audiences.
Still, I cannot find Alexia Palmer.
That does not mean Donald Trump made her disappear. I have no evidence of that, and I am not going to invent some Hollywood ending because the actual story is disturbing enough.
It does mean I want to know where she is.
Palmer was hardly invisible in 2016. She spoke publicly. She appeared on national television. She challenged Trump Model Management in federal court. She spoke directly to reporters about her treatment. Then the public trail becomes exceedingly difficult to follow.
So where is she?
What became of the Department of Labor appeal?
Did she return permanently to Jamaica?
Did she receive money through some later arrangement?
Was there ever a settlement?
Was there a confidentiality agreement?
Did she simply decide she had endured enough and wanted nothing further to do with Donald Trump, modeling, lawyers, reporters or the United States?
Was she pressured by anybody?
Is she alive, healthy and happily living a private life somewhere?
I hope that last answer is the answer.
Then let us find her and hear it from Alexia Palmer.
There is another reason these questions deserve attention. Palmer’s allegations were not the only allegations concerning Trump Model Management. Other former foreign models later described questionable immigration practices, crowded agency housing, large deductions from their earnings and working arrangements that left them with remarkably little money. In September 2016, Senator Barbara Boxer called for federal immigration authorities to investigate allegations concerning Trump Model Management.
Trump Model Management eventually shut down in 2017.
Alexia Palmer’s questions survived it.
This is why I get irritated when every discussion of Trump and young women immediately gets dragged back to Jeffrey Epstein.
There are serious questions about Epstein, certainly.
I do not need Epstein for this one.
Donald Trump owned Trump Model Management. Palmer was recruited into Trump Model Management at seventeen. Trump Model Management participated in securing the visa that brought her from Jamaica to the United States. The immigration paperwork represented substantial annual earnings. Palmer said the promised money never materialized. She said deductions consumed most of what she earned. Her ability to work legally in America was tied to the employer who had brought her here. She fought the company in court and then through the Department of Labor.
That record stands on its own.
If you stripped Donald Trump’s name from the story and told Americans that a wealthy American businessman operated an international modeling company that recruited a seventeen-year-old girl in Jamaica, brought her across an international border under employment paperwork representing $75,000 a year, placed her into an arrangement where she claimed she ultimately received only a few thousand dollars, and controlled the employment upon which her legal work status depended, I suspect people would have a very different reaction.
They might even use the words possible international labor trafficking.
They certainly ought to use the words possible exploitation of a foreign minor.
Somebody should have investigated exactly that.
Not a civil judge deciding whether a complaint satisfied the technical elements of several causes of action.
Investigators.
People empowered to subpoena records. Follow the money. Examine immigration submissions. Interview every model housed by the agency. Determine who made the representations contained in visa applications. Compare those representations with actual bookings and payments. Determine how housing and other charges were calculated. Interview the people who recruited teenage models overseas. Determine what management knew and when they knew it.
That is what I mean by investigation.
Perhaps such an investigation would have found no trafficking crime at all.
Fine.
Then we would have an answer.
Instead, we have a seventeen-year-old girl, an international recruitment operation, employer-controlled immigration status, enormous discrepancies between projected earnings and money allegedly received, allegations of exploitative conditions, a lawsuit dismissed without the underlying factual dispute ever being tested at an evidentiary trial, an administrative fight that disappeared from public attention, and a woman who seems to have largely vanished from the public record.
Last week’s federal indictment of 15 anti-ICE protestors in Minnesota as alleged “Antifa” members — and thus domestic terrorists — is a masterclass in how the FBI is now practicing “pre-crime,” arresting normal citizens beforethey commit a crime, or without regard to whether they’ve committed a crime at all.
It is one of the first cases where presidential national security memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) has been explicitly referenced by the Justice Department as directing arrests, a new practice that began this month. U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen said that the directive established Joint Task Force Vanguard to “prioritize politically motivated violence,” which to the Trump administration of course means its opponents. The directive, Rosen, also said, directs federal investigators “to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt those who engage in political violence and intimidation.”
Rosen was asked at the press conference how the Justice Department defines Antifa, and basically had no answer. “What is Antifa goes beyond, goes beyond, I think, the scope of what this indictment is,” he replied. “But what I can tell you is that we have plenty of people that self-identify in that way, and you might wanna ask them that question.”
And as to whether anyone was actually hurt, here too Rosen stumbled. “Whether or not they actually, at the end of the day, caused bodily harm is not the measure of whether or not they committed a serious federal crime,” said, sounding like a kid who hadn’t done the homework being called on in class.
In other words, the federal government is prosecuting a group it cannot even define.
The Trump administration’s war on its opponents finds its solid form in the war on Antifa. Because President Trump “designated” Antifa as a terrorist group, “counterterrorism” rules apply. Think of the modern day FBI objective as preventing another 9/11: that is, following the doctrine of the past two decades, which is to stop an attack before it happened.
Though they don’t say it explicitly, Task Force Vanguard is in the business of pre-crime. Under NSPM-7, the feds require no crime to actually have been committed. They only need “indicators.” The indicators are broad enough to sweep in millions of Americans: “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” “extremism on migration,” as I’ve previously reported.
Antifa as an indicator is absurd. At protests I’ve covered over the past couple of years, when I asked people what they thought of Antifa, the answer I heard again and again — from moms, from grandpas — was “I’m Antifa!” Some of the protestors were being playful, some were being defiant. But what they didn’t mean was that they were part of some organization as Washington imagines it. When I asked them why Antifa, the answer was universal. They are anti-fascist, which in non-national security terms is what they thought the word simply meant.
That confusion has produced mishaps that would be funny if the stakes weren’t what they are — like the time federal law enforcement was convinced it had identified the “leader of Antifa,” who turned out to be some random guy in Portland, as I reported.
U.S. Attorney Rosen announced at his press conference:
“Today, a federal indictment was unsealed charging 15 defendants with conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers and other charges related to efforts of two Minneapolis-based Antifa groups that violently opposed the enforcement of federal law in our state. The defendants are members and associates of Direct Action Minnesota… These defendants have been charged not for what they said, but for what they did. They all joined an agreement, a conspiracy, to interfere with lawful immigration enforcement operations.”
“Conspiracy” sounds to me like an awful lot like civil disobedience or free speech. Note, for instance, that the most vivid piece of evidence Rosen actually presented to reporters was a video of one defendant, Kyle Wagner, using violent rhetoric — speech — which sits awkwardly beside Rosen’s insistence that nobody was being charged “for what they said.”
NSPM-7 was signed in September 2025, three days after Trump’s executive order designating Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. It directs the government to disrupt networks supposedly “animated” by beliefs that include anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, and “extremism on migration.” Attorney General Pam Bondi’s implementation memo — titled “Ending Political Violence Against ICE” — pointed that apparatus squarely at people accused of impeding immigration enforcement. Joint Task Force Vanguard is now the enforcement arm with a much broader target.
In its zeal to arrest and convict its political opponents, the Trump administration has so far been unsuccessful. In January, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem proudly announced that ICE had survived “an attempted murder of federal law enforcement” in north Minneapolis, suggesting protestors were directly threatening law enforcement officers. What she described as federal officers “ambushed and attacked by three individuals who beat them with snow shovels and the handles of brooms,” forcing one officer to fire “a defensive shot,” ended up being two Venezuelan DoorDash drivers with no violent records.
Then the video surfaced. City surveillance footage showed a scuffle lasting about 12 seconds, with no snow-shovel beating; a shovel sat on the ground the entire time. Authorities had the footage within hours of the shooting. Prosecutors didn’t bother to watch it until weeks after they’d charged the men and put an agent’s sworn account in front of a judge. In February, Rosen’s own office moved to dismiss the charges with prejudice — meaning they can never be refiled — citing evidence “materially inconsistent” with the affidavit. A federal judge agreed. Two ICE agents were placed on administrative leave for apparently lying under oath.
Minneapolis’s police chief offered the epitaph: the agents “hung themselves.”
This was no one-off. The local CBS affiliate in Minneapolis combed throughcourt filings and found at least 18 Minnesotans whose assault-on-an-officer cases were dropped, with a judge dismissing charges for 15 of them. The sworn affidavits of a single ICE agent turned up in roughly ten of the dismissed cases. In one case Rosen himself moved to drop charges, the defendant said federal agents had shackled him to a hospital bed for days without access to his phone.
Another case collapsed after a judge found that Bondi had publicly named arrested protesters in a social-media post — violating the court’s sealing order and, the judge wrote, “likely” several Justice Department policies.
And the pattern isn’t confined to Minnesota. In Chicago’s “Operation Midway Blitz,” prosecutors charged the “Broadview Six” — a group that included a Democratic congressional candidate and a Democratic candidate for the state legislature — with conspiring to “impede” an ICE officer outside a detention facility. A federal judge tossed the case over prosecutorial misconduct, including allegations of jury tampering and misleading the court.
Of 22 prosecutions in the Chicago area under the federal impeding-an-officer statute, 16 have been dismissed or never reached indictment, according to a Chicago Sun-Times tally cited by CNN.
In Los Angeles, the government has lost all five such cases that reached trial — five straight acquittals.
None of this is slowing down the White House. “Trump Administration Delivers Another Crushing Blow to Antifa Terrorist Network,” the White House announced with the Minnesota arrests. The release details federal cases against “Antifa” individuals in states including Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, Washington, New Jersey, California, and Indiana.
Rosen closed by calling political violence “a national scourge in our times.” Not gas prices. Not rent. Not the cost of healthcare. Or childcare. That’s what you get when the imperatives of “national security” are allowed to set a society’s priorities — especially once “national security” has been redefined to mean almost anything the government wants it to.
Subscribe if you saw Antifa hanging out with bigfoot
The movie clip above is not connected to the commentary below from Andy Singh Baines. I added it to give some idea of the important role the Indian people, and all the colonised people played in WW1 and WW2 fighting for the British. Nigerians and other colonial people were a huge section of the British armed forces, this is so of the Irish as Ireland was England and then Britain's first colony before British capitalism colonised India, or parts of Africa.
Laurence Fox, the right wing racist British actor had made disparaging remarks about a Sikh soldier appearing in the movie 1917, claiming it was "forced diversity." One can imagine the insult this is to Indians and the Sikh population in general. Having grown up in a military family and in the UK after Myanmar and Nigeria, I would not have known of the contribution Indians played in fighting for Britain against the Nazi's and Japanese Imperialism. My father, though a conservative, talked often of the heroism of these people especially the Gurkhas.
The right wing forces in the UK that are attacking immigrants and siding with Neo-fascists and white supremacists are being looked to by many English people who are completely unaware that their safety and freedom as members of a parliamentary democracy was defended by immigrants or their parents who are being vilified in the UK today.
I am very much in agreement with Andy Singh Baines' comments below.
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Andy Singh Bains
During World War One, over 65,000 Sikhs served in the British Indian Army, comprising 22% of its forces despite only being 2% of India’s population. During World War Two, over 300,000 Sikhs served in that same army. Together, over 83,000 Sikhs died in both wars.
These facts are being used by Sikh politicians in Britain right now to critique the rhetoric of the far-right and to console racist and backward sections of the population by showing that Sikhs are “loyal citizens” that can be trusted and that many of them “sacrificed their lives for democracy in Britain.”
In reality, these two wars were fought not for “democracy” - as Lenin showed, democracy under capitalism has always been, like in ancient Athens, simply democracy for the slave-owners - but instead, these wars were fought for the selfish interests of the British Empire, and thousands of Sikhs, alongside thousands of other Indians, were just seen and used as cannon-fodder for imperialism. After all, how could they have been fighting for “democracy” when Indians were being denied their basic democratic rights and India remained a colony of Britain tied in shackles?
As an aside, this simple fact was even lost by the Communist Party of India which, under orders from Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy, discouraged Indians from struggling against the British because it “disrupted the war effort against fascism.” As a consequence, the Communists, who had grown very popular among the masses for their heroism in the previous period, during the 1920s and 1930s, now became sidelined from them.
Meanwhile, the native bourgeoisie, wrapping itself in the cloak of Gandhi who gave the famous “Do or Die” speech which sparked the Quit India movement (1942-45) or what the Governor-General of India referred to as “by far the most serious rebellion since 1857,” took firm control over the political leadership of the anti-colonial struggle. In 1946, the mutiny of 10,000 sailors in the Indian navy, which was spreading to other sections of the army and which sparked solidarity strikes and riots throughout the subcontinent, from Mumbai to all the way in Karachi, was heading in the direction of a national liberation war for independence against the British.
The leaders of Congress Party and Muslim League, however, condemned the uprising, seeing it as detrimental to a negotiated settlement with the British, which would ensure a safe transfer of power from the imperialists to the native bourgeoisie. With the road to revolution blocked, the pendulum swung toward counter-revolution: the partition of the country, and the bloody communal violence that accompanied it and left millions dead.
Returning to earlier, the only way to ensure the safety of migrants and fight the far-right is through the unity and revolutionary struggle of the working class against capitalism, a system which breeds racism to divide and disorient the common people and turn their attention away from the real cause for worsening living standards. The problem is not that people coming into the country, looking for a better life, are exhausting already limited resources. There are more than enough resources to go around. The problem is that the capitalist class, the millionaires and billionaires, are hoarding most of it. The problem is a system which puts the interests of a few ahead of the collective interests of humanity as a whole.
On Immigrants, Identity, and Who the Real Enemy Is
Richard Mellor Afscme Local 444, retired HEO/GED 5-22-26
A few years ago, my brother Roger Martinez and I were walking past a hookah bar on the Edgware Road in London when three young black women sitting at one of the outside tables, heard Roger’s accent and asked us if we were from America; we said we were.
"We can't go to America," one of them said.
"Why not?" Roger asked.
"We're Somalis, Muslims”, one of them replied, “Trump says we're terrorists and he's barred us from entering the US. There's only 12 million of us on the planet.", she added with a wry smile.
We had forgotten about that ban entirely. We stopped and talked for a while. They were warm, funny young women with strong London accents — they'd been born there. Roger asked about traditional dress and head coverings. They were all dressed as young western women typically dress. They explained that they wore traditional clothing when they wanted to show respect to their parents, at cultural events, or simply when they felt like it. It was part of who they are.
I feel no threat or anxiety about immigrants wearing traditional clothing. When I left London more than fifty years ago, Young Indian women almost always dressed in traditional clothing. That's largely changed now, and it changed on its own terms, over time, within families — not because anyone demanded it.
I'll be honest: when it comes to the full covering of a woman's face and body, as practiced by some Muslims, I find it difficult to look at its origins without seeing misogyny and patriarchy. Whether the Quran demands it or Allah commands it are questions I'll leave to those with more knowledge of the subject than me and to the women themselves. What I am certain of is this — no priest, no mullah, no religious authority, and no politician has the right to tell a woman how to dress. And we should stress that Madison Avenue and the fashion industry pressure women relentlessly too, shaming girls into a different kind of conformity. The coercion comes from many directions.
I’m writing this commentary after watching some of the coverage of the far-right rally in London last week and the disgusting spectacle in the video above, of the rabid crowd chanting "take them off" at three French women on a stage dressed as fully covered Muslim women. It accomplished nothing except cruelty, and if the fascist elements that are behind such events thought they might “shame” this section of the immigrant population in to “assimilation” as they see it, they are wrong.
When people feel attacked, they hold more tightly to the traditions they came from. That's human nature. The second and third generations — the children and grandchildren of immigrants — will negotiate their own relationship with their heritage, and that negotiation will happen within families, organically, in ways that no outsider can engineer or accelerate. Muslims make up roughly 6% of the UK population. And they are overwhelmingly working class. They are not a threat. They are neighbors and, more importantly from a workers’ perspective, they are our class allies.
There is also a breathtaking hypocrisy at the heart of the demand that immigrants abandon their cultural traditions. The British Empire once encompassed 23% of the world's population. British officers, colonial administrators, and settlers went to Africa, India, and across the globe and dressed, worshipped, and conducted themselves as British people. Any soldier who "went native" was considered an embarrassment. The Empire imposed itself on the world. It did not ask permission and it did not assimilate.
Finally, and most importantly: anyone who thinks this movement will stop at Muslims is not paying attention. Muslims are simply the most visible target right now. A Sikh friend told me with some horror that a few Sikhs had shown up alongside the racists at that rally. They would do well to reconsider. The turbans, the kippahs, the crosses that aren't the right kind of cross — all of it is on the list. So are atheists like me.
The crisis ordinary British people are living through is not caused by immigrants. It is a failure of a system that cannot provide basic necessities in one of the wealthiest countries on earth. The people at the top of that system need someone to blame, and immigrants are a convenient answer. Meanwhile, the wars, the drone strikes, the destabilization of entire regions of the Global South — these are what drive people northward in the first place. They are not invaders. They are the refugees of other people's wars
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