a connection!

After reading Mia's post about the Irish fleeing to America during the potato famine and then the injustices of the courts in Ireland against Catholics, I realized many parallels to my previous post. In rough times, there seems to be a trend that when things get bad in the mother land, people go to North America and set up communities there. Also, during occupation, the originally Catholic Irish were treated poorly much like the Latvians were treated poorly by the Russians. However, the potato famine was not created by the British, which means that the Irish left the homeland due to a natural disaster, if I may call it that, rather than because of their oppression by the British. In the case of the Latvians, people left because they did not want to have to deal with the oppression of the soviet regime. I thus wonder, was there at all a trend in in Ireland in which people left because of the way they were treated by their occupying nation?