Word: xenophobia
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...particularly good moment to be a poor foreigner abroad anywhere: witness last month's violent xenophobic riots in South Africa. "When people are troubled by rising food prices, there are two easy scapegoats: foreigners and the government," Guterres says. "Xenophobia is a very worrying problem, and it's widespread: we've seen refugees murdered in Ukraine, Russia and Western Europe...
Presidential candidates in both parties have learned this year to be wary of a subject that shows up in so many guises on so many different plates. What tastes like common sense to one voter--cracking down on illegal crossings--smacks of xenophobia to the next, and the same rumble of helicopters and border-patrol Jeeps in the Southwestern desert sounds to some people like America standing up for itself but to others like Emma Lazarus, poet of the Statue of Liberty, rolling over in her grave...
...recent incidents of xenophobia in South Africa not only reveal the brutality of some criminals, they also show the government's difficulties in fighting poverty. Although South Africa's economy has been growing constantly, people in the townships - especially migrant workers from Zimbabwe - do not really benefit. I wonder whether the attacks will impact on South Africa's staging of the 2010 World Cup. Adrian Lobe, STUTTGART, GERMANY...
...Along with the growing cosmopolitanism of the wealthy and the professionals of the new economy, globalization has been accompanied by a surge in xenophobia. The phenomenon may have taken a graphically violent form in South Africa recently, but even in Europe the surge of populist xenophobia since the 1990s has propelled previously fringe groups such as the British National Party, Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front in France, neo-Nazis in Germany and the assassinated Pim Fortuyn's eponymous party in the Netherlands into the political mainstream. Last October, the Swiss People's Party won the largest single share...
...There are many lessons the Rainbow Nation can draw from its recent wave of anti-immigrant violence. Chief among them may be that xenophobia is less about color than about resources, and that the government would be well advised to concentrate less on the black-white divide of the past than on today's chasm between the haves and the have-nots. Apartheid may have made racist despots out of whites; globalization amid inequality and enduring poverty can make a bigot out of anybody...