Many of the people leaving Ireland saw America as a place of good economic opportunity which encouraged them to migrate over. However, the average Irishman's initial experience was unpleasant to say the least. One’s success in the States depended on how well off one was back home. Given that so many of the Irish immigrants were peasants, they they didn’t have a lot of wealth to bring with them and ended up at the bottom of the American economy; in fact, for the most parts Irish peasants could hardly afford to pay the passage to America so they had little money to work with afterwards. Irish men were unskilled so they did unskilled labor while women worked as domestic servants or textile workers. The average Irish migrant’s relatively low wealth dictated where they were settled. For the most part they settled where they landed (i.e. New York, Boston, and Philadelphia) because they didn’t have the money to buy and cultivate land in the countryside. Because of their economic situation they gathered in rough, poor neighborhoods.

To give you an idea of how the Irish immigration experience compared to the German experience, Germans were relatively well-off and had some money from liquidating their assets. German migrants coming to America during the mid to late 1840s could afford to pay for passage and buy land in the States with what was remaining.

Source: "Major Problems in American History" by Elizabeth Cobbs