I joined because the level of xenophobic demagoguery and fear-mongering that has been rising in the USA and Britain over the last few years both outrages and terrifies me to no end. Societies have reviled "the Other" for a long time, but the sheer magnitude of the malice nowadays demands a response. Across the ocean, the British have plunged into Brexit because of a sustained campaign of right-wing bigotry against refugees and continental Europeans, and the age-old British animosity against the Irish -- an incredibly personal issue for me -- has come to the fore in this crisis, with conservative Britons almost gleeful at the prospect of imposing a hard border across Ireland, and a British MP suggesting that the UK should attempt to starve Ireland as punishment for the Irish "obstruction" of Brexit. Meanwhile, here, I am in a daily tizzy because of the monstrous depredations of Trump. The family separation in May and June was a moral low point for our country, and the recent death of Jakelin Caal Maquin, a 7-year-old girl who was starved and dehydrated in Border Patrol custody, is an eternal shame on America. These are the fruits of xenohpobia. TL;DR: I was overwhelmed by the stream of outrages and wanted to do something about it.
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Thanks for your reply, Sapphy. I'm very excited to hear soon-to-be what soon-to-be-Ambassador Palmieri has to say, and I've already signed up for one of the focus groups that morning!
I only used the US and the UK as two examples of the cases where this has affected me the most. I'll leave it to folks more knowledgeable about (for instance) Germany or Hungary to speak in depth about what's going on there.
I like to think that the problem isn't spread out among everybody in these countries. For instance, UK Prime Minister Theresa May is crazily weak (to the point where she had to face a no-confidence motion from her own MPs this week!), and opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn -- a good friend of the Irish -- denied May's Tories a majority in the last general election. As a result, unfortunately, May went into coalition with the Democratic Unionist Party, a far-right pro-British party from Northern Ireland, to keep power, and this has made Hibernophobia a centerpiece of the Brexiteers' rhetoric and actions. I don't blame to British people broadly for this, but the Conservative leadership specifically -- their ideological voters, to a certain extent, but less so. And the same in the USA -- the majority of Americans are against family separation and the idea of building a border wall. However, by the same token, the responsibility for that can firmly be placed on the right wing, from Breitbart up to Trump himself -- but not necessarily on a politically neutral civil servant like Mr. Palmieri.
In the end, though, you're totally right: blame doesn't matter -- solutions do.
All best,
Connor