Go back to where you came from

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"Go back to where you came from" is a racist or xenophobic epithet which is used in many countries, and it is mainly used to target immigrants and falsely presumed immigrants.^[1]

In contemporary United States, it is directed often at Asian and Hispanic Americans, and sometimes African, Arab, Jewish, and Slavic Americans.^[2][3] It has even been directed towards Indigenous Americans in the US.^[4] There is also a common variant of the phrase that has been popularized by the Ku Klux Klan: "Go back to your country." The phrase has a long history which goes back at least as far as 1798. It was originally used in the US by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and targeted at other European immigrants, such as Irish, Italians, Poles, and Jews.^[5][6]

The phrase was popularized during World War I and World War II in relation to German Americans, who were subject to suspicion, discrimination, and violence.^[7] The term is often accompanied with an erroneous assumption of the target's origin; for example, Hispanic and Latino Americans may be told to "Go back to Mexico" even if they aren't Mexican.^[8] The message conveys a sense that the person is "not supposed to be there, or that it isn't their place." The speaker is presumed to be a "real" American, but the target of the remark is not.^[9]

Such phrases are deemed by the United States federal government and the court system to be discriminatory in the workplace. Their use has been accepted as evidence of workplace discrimination in cases brought before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a federal government agency that "enforces federal law to make sure employees are not discriminated against for their gender, sex, national origin or age."^[10] EEOC documents specifically cite the use of the comment "Go back to where you came from," as the example of unlawful workplace conduct by co-workers and supervisors, along with the use of "insults, taunting, or ethnic epithets, such as making fun of a person's accent," deemed to be "harassment based on national origin."^[10][11]