Walking around the Irish neighborhoods of Woodlawn in the Bronx and Yonkers on Saturday, I got a sense of a great absence. 

At a time when 100,000 are set to leave Ireland by April 2012, the silence on the streets of the Bronx, where new arrivals are still quite rare, was deafening. 

McLean Avenue in Yonkers and Woodlawn were busy enough, but nothing like what I saw in Kilburn, on a recent visit to London, where young Irish emigrants are teeming in by the planeload. 

Ireland's loss should have been America's opportunity, but somewhere along the line, going back to the disastrous 1965 Immigration Act, which ended most emigration from Europe, we lost the plot.

That bill was conceived to end the European dominance of immigration to America, which was a fair enough objective, and to allow other nations access, but in the process it effectively ended European immigration altogether. 

Senator Edward Kennedy, who was a key figure in the passage of that bill, told me he had never intended that to be the consequence, but that is how it all has ended up. 

No Irish Need Apply nowadays still holds true as much as it did after Famine Times. 

This should be a great new era for the Irish in New York, the replenishment of Irish organizations, businesses and social gatherings like what happened in the 1920s, 1950s, and 1980s. 

That 30-year cycle of emigration is underway again now in Ireland, but the preferred destinations are not the Bronx and all points west and north, but rather Australia and Canada. 

Sure there will be some who will come to America, but the reality of living here illegally has by now hit home in Ireland. 

Back in the 1980s, thanks to a concerted Irish government and Irish community push, we managed to win the Morrison and Donnelly visa programs, which took care of the undocumented who lived here then. 

This time around we have not been so lucky. The Irish government was unbearably arrogant about immigration to the United States for several years, having consigned it to the past in the midst of the Celtic Tiger, despite warnings that it inevitably would resume. 

Thus, when the opportunity was snatched up by a country like Australia, which did a deal for its citizens to get 10,000 renewable work but not immigrant visas a year, successive Irish authorities stood idly by. 

The Kennedy/McCain immigration bill was as close as we have come, and the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform, of which I was a founder, turned out thousands of people in Washington, on many occasions, in support of the legislation. 

It was a far from perfect bill, but post-9/11 and with the xenophobia in America against foreigners, it was by far the best vehicle. Alas, it came untracked. 

So now we have essentially no obvious vehicle for the Irish to come to the United States, but perhaps it is time to put on the thinking caps again. 

The floods from Ireland will not stop for several years. Already there are signs that, despite the consequences, many are starting to come here. 

We need to help them out, to begin the quest again to equalize U.S. immigration laws and allow Irish to come here legally in acceptable numbers.