New Settlements
While settlement in the urban Northeast continued, Daniels' analysis reveals a diffusion westward. By 1910 there were more Irish immigrants in Chicago than in Boston.

New Occupations
As for occupational status, Daniels reports:

The occupational structure of the Irish American population was also changing slowly but subtly. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as American cities were undergoing rapid growth and beginning to develop an infrastructure and creating the governmental machinery and personnel necessary to run it, the Irish and their children got in on the ground floor. The Irish policemen and firemen are not just stereotypes: Irish all but monopolized those jobs when they were being created in the post -- Civil War years, and even today Irish names are clearly overrepresented in those occupations. Irish workmen not only laid the horsecar and streetcar tracks, they were also the first drivers and conductors. If the first or immigrant generation worked largely at unskilled and semiskilled occupations, their children increasingly worked at skilled trades. By 1900, when Irish American men made up about a thirteenth of the male labor force, they were almost a third of the plumbers, steamfitters, and boilermakers. Those who worked in industry found themselves lifted up into boss and straw-boss positions as common laborers and were, more and more, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe -- Italians, Slavs, and Hungarians. Yet, at the turn of the century, very large numbers of Irish American men found themselves in unskilled or semiskilled jobs. In 1900 about a fifth of all male workers of whatever generation -- 25 percent of the Irish born, 17 percent of the second generation -- had such jobs.

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Although working Irish American women -- like all American women workers -- enjoyed much less upward mobility than did their brothers, husbands, and sons, some did improve their status. Irish American women workers were overwhelmingly concentrated in domestic service, laundry work, and in the least-well-paying jobs in the New England textile industry. At the turn of the century more than half of all working Irish immigrant women were servants, as were nearly a fifth of second-generation workers. Englishwomen of both generations then comprised an absolute majority of New England's servants and two-fifths or more of those in most eastern cities. Like most American female workers at that time, Irish American married women "with husband present," to use the Census Bureau's category, usually left the labor force at marriage or after becoming pregnant.