Greek right-extremist party “Golden Dawn” hailed the victory of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the USA. In a statement read by MP Ilias Kassidiaris, the GD said that:
“In these American elections, the winners are the forces opposing globalization and illegal migration, and are in favor of clean national states and the self-sufficiency of the national economies.
A great global change has begun and will continue with the victory of nationalists in Austria, of Marine Le Pen in France, the Golden Dawn in Greece,”
the statement said among others.
PS I always thought the USA is officially a migration country…
KTG
While the bulk of the US population are either migrants or the descendants of migrants, there is a significant portion of the population that think being second or third generation Americans makes them “natives”. Great myths have grown about what our immigrant ancestors did to establish themselves in the US.
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For example, my late cousin’s 59 year old daughter wrote on the internet that her “ancestors went through all the rigorous steps to immigrate, got their working papers, learned to speak English, studied hard to get their citizenship and didn’t get welfare”.
While I couldn’t speak for her paternal great grandparents, her maternal ancestors only had to come up with the money for a boat ticket and arrive at Ellis Island free of communicable diseases to fulfill the “rigorous steps” to enter the country. And, in 1903, when they arrived in the US, there was no such thing as a work permit, nor welfare, other than a free public health service hospital that they used. They never became citizens, because they never gained sufficient fluency in English. Living in an Italian ghetto in NYC, Italian sufficed. And, they were not unique in all of this. An estimated 20 to 25% of the adult immigrants from Italy in the early 1900s followed the same pattern.
And anti-immigrant sentiment isn’t particularly new. Again, in the early 1900s, the US placed strict limitations on Asian immigration, and there was serious discussion about limiting those dirty, Roman Catholic, Southern Europeans, lest they pollute society.
The story is the same. Just the names have changed.