Immigration News & Opinion
Sat - May 19, 2012

IrishTimes.com, January 27. “I HAD A flight back to New York after six weeks and I just simply didn’t take it, says designer Susan Kennedy of her impromptu move from the Big Apple to Buenos Aires two years ago. For the Sandymount girl who left Ireland just weeks after her graduation in 1995, putting down roots in a foreign city was nothing new. While studying German and philosophy at UCD, a green card lottery win saw her move to San Francisco. She describes herself as the last of a generation of “presumptive emigrants”. While the job scene in Ireland had started to pick up, she says that, for her, emigration was “just a sort of well-beaten path. I was sort of raised in the culture of that.”
Though always interested in fashion and design, in San Francisco Kennedy got sucked into the tech boom and spent the next 10 years working in Silicon Valley. Working for companies including Knight Ridder, the then parent company of newspapers such as the San Jose Mercury News and the Miami Herald, helping to bring the titles into the digital age, Kennedy describes the culture in the Bay area at the time as “wild”.