I have long wondered how folks starving due to a potato famine (or any other reason) could afford to come to America. While for most folks it wasn't free, it seems that for some it was compulsory (slave trade aside).

I found it interesting (in mg's link) that the paper advising against leaving the east for the west was a New York paper. They could well have been right, what with the panic of 1857 and all, but they wouldn't have been exactly unbiased.

For the record, the earliest any of my ancestors came to Iowa was 1846, the same time period as in the article. They came from North Carolina though, not Ireland.