Last month's dour economic forecast by Ireland's Economic and Social Research Institute rattled the Republic's political and financial sectors. But it also rang alarm bells among immigrant support networks in America, who are now bracing for a surge of undocumented immigrants from both sides of the border on levels not seen since the first roars of the Celtic Tiger in the mid-1990s.

The ESRI predicts that Ireland's current economic contraction will trigger the Republic's first recession in 25 years, and send upwards of 20,000 abroad next year in search of work. Like generations of earlier emigrants, many of these migrants will head for Irish enclaves in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco.

However, instead of a land of plenty, new Irish immigrants will find a country teetering on the brink of recession that has become increasingly hostile to illegal immigrants from all colours, creeds and countries.

The coast-to-coast mass rallies of 2006 staged by advocates for undocumented immigrants' rights garnered international headlines, but they yielded little in the way of advantageous federal legislative reforms.

In fact, in mid-2007 reform legislation — championed by Democratic senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Arizona Senator John McCain, a Republican — died after conservative and liberal Congressional critics respectively took umbrage with different aspects of the bill.

With Ted Kennedy sidelined with a life-threatening brain tumor, and McCain absorbed in a battle with Barrack Obama over residency rights at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, few observers expect any immigration reform legislation to pass Congress until 2009 at the earliest.

All this will be cold comfort for the projected 20,000 Irish immigrants slated to hit US shores over the course of the next year — not to mention the estimated 50,000 Irish already among an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants now in America.

However, Ciaran Staunton, of the New York-based Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform (ILIR), said that, many new immigrants should at least be able to find work for the time being.

"People who came in the '80s couldn't come in undocumented and get work, Staunton told the Belfast Telegraph: "The people who come today can come undocumented and get work. Once people get into the country, there's plenty of work, from what we've seen anyway."

Staunton, a Co Mayo native who owns O'Neil's Bar and Restaurant in Manhattan, said that the ILIR wasn't surprised by ESRI's immigration spike forecast.

"We've seen numbers on the rise for probably the last five or six months," said Staunton, "A lot of people got laid off in the building sites in Ireland before Christmas. Quite a few had not been able to get work after that and would have come here from that stage."

Staunton said that he and others had alerted the Republic's Department of Foreign Affairs about the trend many months ago. However, he claimed, the typical response was "complete denial that people were leaving. And one official said 'Well, people have no reason to leave Ireland anymore. All things are good.'"

"We had a bit of that in the'80s as well," added Staunton, alluding to a decade when annual Irish emigration rates topped 100,000. "Even though the economy was in shreds, officials were denying that people were coming here. You've always got that kind of denial. In the '80s the excuse was 'Well, no government can admit that they can't look after their own people.' And in the last while it's been 'They couldn't be leaving because things are going so well in Ireland.'"

Staunton said that the current Irish immigration upsurge has been from both sides of the border. And he credited Northern Ireland politicians with being aware of the fact.

"The thing about the North is that they dealt with the reality of the situation. And we've met with people from all the parties in the North," said Staunton. "You have had continuous high unemployment in places like west Tyrone and other areas. Many of those people would've been going to places like Dublin to work in the last couple of years. Now that Dublin's slowing up, many are coming to the US."

Brendan Magee of the Chicago Irish Immigrant Support told the Belfast Telegraph that his city is also experiencing an Irish immigrant surge. However, Magee said that most arrive in the Windy City having earlier landed in East Coast ports like Boston and New York.

Magee, a Belfast native originally from the Upper Springfield Road enclave of Dermot Hill, said that most newcomers are from "the western coast of Ireland and those areas where the Celtic Tiger didn't flourish as much as it did in the eastern coast."

He said that new arrivals are a mix of legal and illegal immigrants.

"Chicago does have quite a large undocumented population," he said "They would obviously tend to be construction workers, people who would work in the service industries, but have their own companies in the property development and management field."

"There is a good mix," added Magee. "There is quite a significant number of young Irish professionals that would be here on the H1B visas (which favours the likes of architects, engineers, academics, etc)." Magee said that, unlike many other US cities, newly arrived undocumented Irish will find Chicago more welcoming.

"Nationwide, the undocumented are certainly finding it more hostile because of the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been very prevalent on the television stations and whatnot," said Magee "However, Chicago, specifically, is more immigrant friendly. For example, the city of Chicago has passed an ordinance that states basically that police officers within the city limits are not able to ask anybody their immigration status. So people do find it to be somewhat more lenient here than in other cities."

A similar welcome mat isn't likely to be found in sunny San Diego, California.

Bernadette Cashman, of Irish Outreach San Diego, told the Belfast Telegraph that her city has seen "more of an increase in (outward) migration, rather than immigration — migration to other states of (undocumented Irish) who were here."

She said that, because of the proximity of the Mexican border, San Diego is on the frontlines of the US immigration debate.

"It's a different outlook here because you cannot hide as you can in other parts of the country, because we're under the microscope, if you will," she said.

Cashman said that significant numbers of people that her agency has dealt with have come from Northern Ireland.

She said that "romantic issues" have played a large role, as in someone from Northern Ireland who followed a spouse or partner back to America in the hopes of settling down, only to find that things are "much more complicated now that it was before in terms of how you can legally be here."

And, like Ciaran Staunton and Brendan Magee, she doesn't expect any liberalizing legislation from Congress this side of November's general election.