Ayan Said changed her parking habits when two men chucked bottles at her as she walked to work. The 29-year-old PhD candidate said they “shouted ‘go back to your country’ then hurled plastic bottles filled with water” from a car window in the central Auckland suburb of Greenlane earlier this year. “It was February, I was just walking to work in my headscarf.”

Since then she has parked directly outside her office. Said has to dash out every two hours and move her car, to avoid getting a ticket, but that’s better than the “constant feeling of insecurity” strolling footpaths now gives her.

Amanda Saxton, Stuff, 2019

On a rainy day during her sophomore year of high school, as Aissata Ba studied in the library, a photo popped into her phone. It showed a beheading by Islamic State militants, along with a caption in red letters: “Go back to your country.” Ba reported the incident. Administrators never tracked down the person who sent it.

It was not the first time she’d been the focus of hatred. There was the boy in sixth grade who would say “Allahu Akbar” and throw his backpack near her, pretending it was a bomb. The time in eighth-grade math class when a boy turned to her and asked how she could “be part of a religion of terrorists.”

Britney Mejia, Los Angeles Times, 2021

While New Zealand welcomed my family, I experienced crude racism, like most Muslim immigrants living in a western country. People called me a “terrorist” and demanded that I go back to my “own country.” Teachers would interrogate me for speaking Arabic: “You’re in New Zealand now, and in New Zealand we speak English.”

People would make racist and bigoted assumptions and ask, “Where are you really from?” A friend once asked that I refrain from telling his parents that I was Muslim. I was advised to add a headshot to my resume to show that I do not wear a hijab, to avoid discrimination in the hiring process.

Hadeel Salman, Global Citizen, 2019

To many, President Donald Trump’s tweets telling four American minority congresswomen to “go back” to the “places from which they came” rang familiar. Divisions that suggest that some people belong and others do not, based on race, is as much a part of the American fabric as immigration itself.

The tweets were targeted at Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and Rep. Ilhan Omar. Omar was born in Somalia and is one of the first Muslim women in Congress, along with Tlaib.

Yasmeen Alamiri, PBS, 2019