On Twitter I responded to a Muslim writer in Western Canada who had a bitter thread about evil racist people who say "Go back to your country," when he was born in Canada [What’s it like to be a person of colour in Alberta? For some, it means facing overt racism, cruel comments and violent confrontation, by Omar Mosleh, Toronto Star, October 2, 2020].

I pointed out that during a former age, Anglo-Irish in Dublin, Anglo-Indians (which here means people like Rudyard  Kipling, born in Bombay in 1895) white Kenyans, and Rhodesians were all told by the indigenous Irish, Indians and Africans to "go back where they came from" even if they'd been born in Dublin, Bombay, Nairobi or Salisbury, and their fathers before them, sometimes for generations.

And minorities have been telling the Historic American Nation, established in 1587, to go Back To Europe for twenty years. You frequently see this on signs at protests carried by illegal immigrants from Mexico.

So maybe it's not THAT unreasonable to ask the locally born child of an immigrant to go "back" to home of their ancestors, where they have dual citizenship, where most of their family is, and to which they seem to be loyal.

 

For example, Mosleh thinks it's a microaggression if people want to know if he's a Christian Arab or Muslim Arab, and also if they want to know where he's really from, i.e., his ancestry:

Why is that so hard to answer? Obama was born in Hawaii (as far as I know) but was able to say in a speech  "I'm the first Kenyan-American to be president." It was a speech in Nairobi, and he, like many children of immigrants, would be entitled to reclaim the citizenship of his father.

 

I'm sure if anyone ever told Obama to "go back where he came from" it was racist, but in his book Dreams From My Father: A Story Of Race And Inheritance, he described actually doing that, temporarily.  America and Kenya might both have been better off if he'd stayed.