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I want to make four points here. (1) The debate over the existence of NINA signs/ads and what their prevalence says about the Irish in 19C America, is silly and sexist. (2) Jensen and Fried's articles and the media fervor over them demonstrates the same dynamics at work in history academic writing and pop journalism that we see and lament in the scientific community. (3) Having to pointlessly debate whether signs and ads existed obscures the historical inquiries that are actually interesting here. (4) It is no accident that NINA is capturing people's attention in a 2015, 2016 world. This is a question about the discipline of history, and the two articles in question were published in 2002 and 2016. No modern politics prohibition rules need apply.

Point the First

First, the debate over the existence of NINA wanted ads and signs, period, is silly and sexist. They existed. They were common. Master Skeptic Jensen knows it and says it:

NINA originated with women domestic servants.

[...]

The market for female servants included a small submarket in which religion or ethnicity was specified. Thus newspaper ads for nannies, cooks, maids, nurses and companions sometimes specified "Protestant Only."

Margaret Lynch-Brennan's article on Irish women domestic works in Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States catalogues other examples, including a litany of complaints connecting "Irish" with "Catholic" (demanding time off for weekly Mass plus Holy Days of Obligation):

In 1868, for instance, one such ad seeking a woman “to take the care of a boy two years old, in a small family in Brookline,” stipulated that “positively no Irish need apply.”

Circling back to the debate at hand in this thread, Lynch-Brennan even cites Jensen on the existence of NINA.

That is, as directed at women.

I don't disagree that whether NINA ads and signs directed at men/men's jobs (mostly unskilled labor, which was where the 19th century Irish were hired in abundance) were reasonably common is an important question. It absolutely is. But treating it as the only question, which this "debate" does, is sexist and historically misleading. (Funny how that works...)

See, this isn't just a debate about NINA ads. It's steeped in two different historical questions: discrimination against Irish-Americans in the 19C, and the 19C cultural discourse of NINA. It's very clear that "No Irish Need Apply," in that exact phrasing, was something of a cultural buzzword. It shows up anecdotally and generically in songs, letters, and journalism on both sides of the Atlantic. That is, referring to a general knowledge of ads and signs and sentiment, rather than specific cases.

If there were no NINA ads and signs (or, because Jensen did turn up examples, they were so rare that a given literate person in an Irish-heavy city would, statistically speaking never read one in their entire life, which is his actual claim), then the existence of this deeply entrenched cultural conversation needs to be explained. It needs to be explained and analyzed in its 19th century context, and the historical memory of it through to today needs to be explained and analyzed in light of the 19C evidence. This, in fact, is the subject of most of Jensen's article.

But NINA signs did exist in fairly decent number. Directed at women. The implicit claim that ads targeting women could not create such a powerful cultural "meme" is sexist badhistory.

Point the Second

The peer-reviewed articles by Jensen and Fried

• "No Irish Need Apply": A Myth of Victimization," Journal of Social History 36, no. 2 (Winter 2002) - PDF link
• "No Irish Need Deny: Evidence for the Historicity of NINA Restrictions in Advertisements and Signs," Journal of Social History 49, no. 4 (Summer 2016) - DOI: 10.1093/jsh/shv066 - Abstract

and the pop media reporting of them betray the same dynamics at work in science academia and I F*cking Love Science-style "science journalism."

Historians in academia feel the same pressure as scientists to "publish or perish." This was true in 2002; this is even more true today. As in science, history publication in worthwhile journals (i.e. ones that your job application/tenure review/uni administration will care about) requires original research with original conclusions. And exciting, ground-breaking conclusions are more likely to get major attention by prestigious publishers. "No Irish Need Apply: Yup, It Existed, But It Wasn't As Common When Directed At Men" is not going to turn heads.

Don't get me wrong, Jensen's article cuts corners. Fried points out one of the most important. His digital archives scan--and to publish in 2002, he's conducting research in the dark 2000-2001 days of Pets.com and no Amazon Prime; the term "digital humanities" did not yet exist--was limited in terms of numerical coverage, which Jensen admits. Fried's very cogent criticism (pp.4-5) is that it was also biased in terms of the audience of the original sources.

The papers catalogued by databases when Jensen was researching tended towards the upscale (New York Times, The Nation) rather than populist (New York Sun). Fried posits that Irish temp laborers would have been less likely to reach for the NYT and more likely to turn to something like the Sun. Jensen doesn't acknowledge the gap. Both scholars fail to situate NINA ads/Irish-American readership potential in the context of other wanted ads. (Basically, if the contemporary NYT has a bunch of pie-carrier and ditch-digger ads, we can get a sense of who's using it to look for what kinds of jobs).

So if there are important methodological flaws, why do these articles get published? Because academic publishing is a $25.2 billion dollar per year industry (2015), and the actual entities who have the biggest stake in this are journal editors. Journals make money based off article downloads through the database service that hosts them, money that in a lot of cases is critical to the journal continuing to operate (frequently, in justifying the extra support from the university or organization that edits and publishes it. Iconoclastic and famous articles like "Irish-American Discrimination Is A Myth" (I paraphrase) are going to get a lot more clicks than "Religious Poverty, Mendicancy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages" (Michael Bailey, why). Database gatekeepers, the cat-stroking Bond villains of academia, want journals that will get downloads so university libraries will pay the insane amounts of money to (a) subscribe (b) keep non-university individuals from having individual access.

To make a splash--especially against a Himalaya-sized metanarrative at the time--Jensen (and his publisher) needs to state his case in very strong terms. The problem is that he is too strong. It opens the door to get published in a major major journal and to be heard above the din of generic academic noise (an even bigger problem today than in 2002). Academic scholars understand and accept this kind of practice. The beginning of Fried's article, in fact, cites a parade of the usual "Okay, time to nuance the overly strong claim" responses and efforts to further the investigation of the wider topic, discrimination against Irish immigrants in 19C America.

But it also opens the door to easier takedowns, if someone is so motivated.

A word about Fried. Her own evidence looks damning against Jensen's apparent claim that NINA was "a myth" in the sense of it not existing (which is not actually his argument--again, gotta get published, gotta be heard). What she actually has are...a few more examples. One of things that I, as a medievalist, really like is that she includes reports of NINA ads, not just ads themselves. When dealing with ephemera (like basically any sign would be), that's a necessary additional step. But she's not above some dodginess of her own.

One particularly pressing flaw, because she spends a good amount of time on it in the body of the text, relates to her insistence that she, following Jensen, will not discuss cases where NINA applied to women's work. Indeed, her lengthy appendix with full-text quotes of the ads and anecdotes of ads/signs is very rich with references to YOUNG MAN and/or male specific jobs. But some of the major examples she draws on in the body of the text are ambiguous, often just saying "servant" or not specifying at all. (Including her attack on Jensen for saying there were no lawsuits over NINA; the example case involves "servant"). The assumption that anything not specifically gendered female is male--especially for an occupation heavily linked to women--is a glaring problem.

But that gets back to the need to be iconoclastic to get published in big journals. It makes a difference that Fried can say, "His entire claim about lawsuits is demonstrably false." (Remember, Jensen has explicitly excluded women from his study.)

cont'd

I talked about both the articles in some comments when the article first came out. Here's one (read all the way down the comments because I got in an argument with a particularly obstinacy person who hadn't read either article so I end up rehashing the evidence and arguments for them), heres the other (this one was meant to stand alone, so read this first). "He" is Jensen who wrote the original article, "she" is Fried the high school student who wrote the second article.

A summary might be:

I'll also say that she had a different set of tools available to her than he did even fifteen years ago, so it's not surprising that she found more examples than he could (she found, let's also admit, at most 69, and possibly up to a third less than that, across all digitized North American papers for all of the 19th and early 20th centuries). While it happened, it seems clear that this was not particularly common, especially in the period he's discussing. If he had these tools, I think he would have made slightly different language ("rare" instead of "none"), but made largely the same argument.

[...]He argues that by the end of the civil war, there was no particularly notable labor market discrimination against male Irish workers, and more than half of her examples come from before that period. I counted 22 of her 69 examples came from the 1840's, with 11 more from the 1850's, and six more come from the 1860's, meaning that more than half come from the period before the one he's actually discussing. Interestingly, his idea that the phrase was popularized by a British song seems to be right on--the most popular year is 1842, the year the song was published, and the second most popular year was 1843, and there are no references to it in America earlier than that (again, as he says in his article, this was a more common thing to see in British ads, which is why there was a song written about it in London).

[...]By his count, she has one reference to a physical sign, by her count, she has at least three, so a very small proportion of the 69 at best, but the myth is always about signs, not newspaper ads (obviously, newspaper ads show up in our records better than physical signs, but there's not a clear reason why reactions). Again, though, this is 69 total references to this over almost 100 years in all the available newspapers all over the U.S., with more than half of the references coming between 1842 and 1869 (where is where the argument of his article really begins). It's certainly not "never", but it is still quite rare in the U.S. for male workers (his argument is only about male workers, only in the U.S., only after the 1860's--his article acknowledges that this common in ads for female domestic help where ethnicity and religion were often specified, common in England, and discrimination against Irish-Americans was present before the 1860's but not was a large factor afterwards--he's arguing especially against people who claimed they were common well into the 20th century).

[...]Where I think he's wrong is in three points: 1) he presents evidence of a lack of clear labor market discrimination, and then makes arguments about lack of political discrimination which I think is not true. Just look at the controversy around JFK, or especially the anti-Catholicism in the 1920's of things like the second Klu Klux Klan. 2) I think his argument for why the (rare) NINA became such a facet of collective memory is unconvincing and speculative and to be honest I'm not sure I really understand it, and 3) I think he underestimates labor market discrimination as a whole (even today, studies consistently find labor market discrimination against women and minorities) and so should have emphasized that they faced relatively little labor market discrimination in the late 19th and early 20th centuries relative to other non-WASP groups, not that they faced none in that time period and everything was more or less fine from the Civil War onward.

In sum, No Irish Need Apply ads seem to have been rare but not unheard of, as Jensen initially claimed. Jensen's larger points that there seems to be limited anti-Irish discrimation in male employment in America (while granting there was some in female employment in America, and a more in all employment in England) seems to hold. His points about non-discrimination in non-labor market arenas is less convincing. He does make a compelling case about this sign that its myth was certainly bigger than its reality, though Fried's point that you can find a number of references (max 69, Jensen argues not all are relevant in content or period) but there seems to be 1) only one or two documented cases of signs, which is what the myth is about, 2) she found maybe 69 references in job ads, etc over a 90 year period in newspapers from 22 cities, which is not very many.

Fried is right about the small point (there are some references to NINA in primary sources), Jensen is right about the big point (these are rare, certainly not common like the myth would have you believe), but also perhaps overstates it and is wrong about somethings that aren't directly being included in this debate (Jensen's article reads like the Irish faced no discrimination hardly at all, when this seems not to be true in politics where there was clear anti-Catholic discrimination well into the 20th century).

Edit: (if this should ever be linked to for some reason, Sunagainstgold's answer higher up on this page puts this one to complete shame and much more comprehensively and insightfully deals with the issue.)

Related question: you also hear about these signs and other forms of anti-Irish discrimination in Britain, is that still uncontroversial?

Related question: Generally speaking, as digitization of older sources continues, how popular is it to "regularly" search expanding databases for "new" data?

Followup question: How about in Australia? I've got a Catholic name, and my parents told me that their parents were worried it might disadvantage me in life. Is the 'Irish/Catholics need not apply' story based on truth down under as well?

Somewhat related: were signs like these also used for Italians when they came to America? I'm a Boston Italian and remember being told by my grandmother that Italians were discriminated against.