Lower than a snake's belly: Myths and realities of immigration

[Kritias]

Hello there!

I've been recently talking with Aexodus in a thread he opened, and he offered a piece of his mind that I found as a very interesting base to start off a conversation about immigration. I'm going to share his piece here as a proper homage,

This is a good nuanced muse on the topic. The perception of immigrants taking jobs is a part of the malthusian idea you mention, also in a way there is no ‘space’ in a country’s identity for other groups if they don’t assimilate for some people. Take Northern Ireland. We got Irish Catholics, Ulster Protestants, you could divide it further down to Gaelic speakers and Ullans speakers. Basically those are the native groups that are I suppose, expected to be the groups living here as their own communities. When for example, a self sufficient Polish community appears in for example Dungannon, people feel uncomfortable, even threatened. I would cautiously suggest these fears are exaggerated but not unfounded. I hear Eastern European languages on the street more and more, and they’re not tourists.

I would be lying if I said it doesn’t make me uneasy that four times as many people speak Polish at home than Irish. This isn’t simply about skin colour. There’s something more complicated than that going on.

We were debating the possibility of economics as opposed to demographics or culture as the driving force behind xenophobia. And his answer got me thinking. Has immigration always been the case where a foreign, differently cultured people had a hard time assimilating into the accepting society?

No. It's not.

The greatest migration crisis to ever hit Greece didn't come a few years back (2015 - ) but on the aftermath of WWI, and the failed military expedition in Turkey from 1919 to 1922 culminating in the Lausanne Treaty (1922-23). This treaty typically sealed the greatest tensions between Greece and Turkey, namely millions of muslims and christian populations that lived intermixed in both societies, and who now had to be uprooted and deported in their respective countries. This uprooting cause a refugee crisis of about 3 million people in total and statistics of that period show about 1.2 million people entered Greece in the space of few months. By the end of 1928, about 1.5 million refugees had settled in Greece. To contrast the magnitude, the immigration crisis of 2015 involved about a third of that number. From 2007 up to 2015, just 216,000 people had crossed into the country and most of them moved on, while during the immigration crisis we heard so much about entries to Greece reached the total of 453,912.

Why would you care about Greece, you ask. Well, let me tell you. Greece can offer you a case study of immigration with the optimal parameters for the assimilation of the immigrant population. Namely, during 1922-1923, the refugees were ethnically, linguistically and culturally identical to the native population and to a crushing majority, even if some Armenians and Assyrians and other christian groups managed the crossing. So, if the cultural hypothesis was correct, then the Asia Minor refugees coming into Greece in 1922-1923 would be one of the few cases in history when the immigrants assimilated immediately and there were no hiccups between the natives and the refugees.

Yeah. You guessed where this is going. The Asia Minor refugees suffered just as greatly as the Albanians coming in 1990s, and the immigrants from the Levant coming in Greece right now.

I'm just going to present some quotes from books describing the passage, and every day life of the Asia Minor immigrants in Greece,

The condition of these people upon their arrival in Greece was pitiable beyond description. They had been herded upon every kind of craft that could float, crowded so densely on board that in many cases they had only room to stand on deck. They were exposed alternately to the blistering sun and cold rain of variable September and October. In one case, which I myself beheld, seven thousand people were packed into a vessel that would have been crowded with a load of two thousand. In this and many other cases there was neither food to eat nor water to drink, and in numerous instances the ships were buffeted about for several days at sea before their wretched human cargo could be brought to land. Typhoid and smallpox swept through the ships. Lice infested everyone. Babes were born on board. Men and women went insane. Some leaped overboard to end their miseries in the sea. Those who survived were landed without shelter upon the open beach, loaded with filth, racked by fever, without blankets or even warm clothing, without food and without money.

My sister was born in the shack and so was I with the help of a midwife, as was always the case back in Asia Minor. There were no hospitals available or maternity clinics, only midwives helping women to deliver. There was no running water in our shacks of course. There were communal municipal taps on some corners, which were cemented around. I remember we used to go and get water. My poor mother would work to help out my father and would be away all day. Since the water only ran at certain hours of the day, let’s say from ten o'clock to noon or from one o'clock to three, everyone (but primarily the women) would rush out to fill their canisters. We would use old oil cans which had a piece of rounded wood fixed across the middle for a handle, or buckets. Since my mother was away at work and my sister was a seamstress's apprentice and was not home, I would usually have to carry water for my whole family. I can remember the scene when we used to queue up. The women would get up early and go and place their cans in a queue, one behind the other. When the water would come, we would go to the tap and of course sometimes someone would try to queue barge. Then fights would break out with the canister being brought down on each other’s heads. There was also an Armenian woman whom we had nicknamed 'the burned onion', because she would come with her canister and plead with us to let her get water, with the excuse that she had left onions cooking on the fire and they would soon burn.

When the refugees first arrived in Greece, they were met with pity and feelings of a shared brotherhood by the native Greeks. But soon, the burden of rebuilding the country form the war and of accommodating the refugee population changed the attitude to one of hostility. The refugees were openly attacked, being called names like ‘Turkish-spawns’ (tourkosporoi), ‘baptized in yougurt’ (yiaourtovaptizsmenoi) and ‘Orientals’ (anatolites). For the native Greeks, the refugees represented suddenly an Anatolian corruption of Greekness, a Turkified version of themselves, polluted by the Turkish language, Levantine mercantilism and oriental customs, characteristics thought to be shed in mainland long ago. The refugees not only went through the harrowing experience in Asia Minor where they faced persecution and violence, but also a psychological struggle as well which they faced upon arrival in Greece. They felt uprooted from their homes, and their mentality was characterized by an array of opposing forces: a feeling of helpnessness and, at the same time, a masochistic complacency for being utterly destitute; an expression of gratitude for the received assistance followed by cynical observations that the given relief should have been more substantial; an altering interchange of pessimism and optimism, of submission and arrogance, of threat and fear.

As I have discussed in another thread, their integration went as roughly as anyone would expect if the immigrants were coming from an entirely different ethnic, linguistic, and cultural background,

The rembetes themselves came from Asia Minor following the military defeat of Greece in Asia Minor, and the exchange of populations agreed on the Lausanne treaty (1923) that formalized the expulsion of millions of christian and muslim people from their homelands. Their integration to Greek society was difficult, and mostly undesirable from the native Greek population who exhibited great lengths of bigotry against them; many of the refugees, coming from a bourgeois background in the Ottoman empire, were debased and confined to an underclass that had limited rights. Those with bonds in banks like the Bank of the Orient were forced to swap these for a dime on the dollar; women were pushed to domestic work in order to acquire Greek papers; other women, unsuited for domestic work, were diverted to prostitution, a common theme in the songs; pawnshops were set close to the first settling of the migrants in places like Chios, Crete, and Piraeus where the migrants were instructed to sell their valuables (whatever they still had) for cash. The manges and rebetes tended to live in or around Piraeus; they frequented the tekedes (hashish dens); many spent time in jail, either simply for performing their music, or for engaging in other criminal behavior, such as smuggling, theft, or smoking hashish.

The migrants as a whole were accused of crimes of various degrees of severity and were usually the victim of pogroms by the police. Just twenty years later, their neighbourhoods would score the higher death tolls from the hunger winter of 1941. Kessariani, Kokkinia, Nea Smyrni - the dead piled to a greater degree there, which hints towards the existence of systemic obstacles for the Asia Minor immigrants to feed themselves during the Occupation.

Their music coming from that period allows a further glimpse of their understanding of their social exclusion by their compatriots. I present just two cases in the spoilers,

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Where can I find four swords?
And a torch in my hand
To surely set fire today
to the world I loved
The world that left me to rot

To despair’s islands
I communed my own tears
And in my life’s prison
There’s no Sunday,

But I never forgot solitude,
That murderess, that murderess

You came one night
To warm my heart
You tossed me to the dark winter night
You betrayed me, you spat on me
You were my relief, but you faded away
you faded away

Where can I find four candles?
And assured in my soul
To set fire quickly, and burn it down
The world I loved so much, which left me to rot
Left me to rot, and I loved it
I Loved it and I was left to rot



I have no home to go back to
Or a bed to sleep
I have no street, or a neighborhood
To walk on a May’s 1st day.

You told me lies and elusive, big words
Since they day you suckled your first milk.
But now that the snakes are coming out around me
You just dress up in your ancient adornments.
And you never weep for us, Oh mother Greece,
You sell your children to slavery.

You told me lies and elusive, big words
Since they day you suckled your first milk.
But when I had to face my fate, you were just
Trying on your ancient laces, and you took me
off to sell me to the bazaar, as If I were some kind of monkey.

Greece, oh Greece,
You mothered my despairs.

You told me lies and elusive, big words
Since they day you suckled your first milk.
But now that fires rage again, you just look
On to your ancient beauties, and in the world’s
Arenas, Mother Greece, the same old lie
you always tell.

So, I think that the cultural difference hypothesis as a basis for xenophobia and racism doesn't hold water. If it did, then the Greeks coming from Asia Minor would have a way easier time being accepted. What's more, the connections made by the native people between the Asia Minor refugees and hated people, ie the Turks, wouldn't have happened. Yet, they did. If that's not the case though, then what is it?

I offered my preliminary thoughts here and here, but again this is falling way out of the mark. It feels very complicated to be economics combined by neurotisism. So fellow members, I offer the debate to you; what, if anything, you think are the main factors behind xenophobia?

[Aexodus]

Boi you just opened a barrel of 6ft worms.

I offer the debate to you; what, if anything, you think are the main factors behind xenophobia?

That conflates opposition to immigration with xenophobia.

ethnically, linguistically and culturally identical

Having two groups like that in one country. Rings a bell but I just can’t figure out why...

Opposition to immigration or even full on sectarianism can be because of a number of factors, maybe any kind of combination, such as social, economic or political.

In the Greek case, my Google search turned up this PDF that sums up the situation in one of the paragraphs.

https://ef.huji.ac.il/sites/default/...nic_marker.pdf

The refugees supported the military coup that overthrew the royalist government and executed, after a trial, the six politicians and members of the military considered as responsible for the 'Catastrophe'. Hence, from the beginning of their obligatory coexistence in Greece the two groups, the indigenous Greeks and the refugees, although they shared a common religion and for the most part a common language, did not necessarily share common political visions.9 Moreover, the presence of refugees led to a fierce antagonism with local inhabitants for jobs and mainly for the lands that were abandoned by the exchanged Muslims who had left for Turkey. Therefore, 'resource competition' and the allocation by state agents of resources contributed to the consolidation of refugee identity.10

This next paragraph describes the mutual hatred that grew from the initial tensions.

Under these circumstances the adjective 'refugee' had negative connotations and the local Greeks used a variety of insults such as 'tourkosporoi' (Turkish offspring), 'giaourtovaftismeni' (baptized in yogurt) and especially for Pontic Greeks 'aoutides' (from the way they pronounced the demonstrative pronoun 'autos').16 As these terms demonstrate, even the notion of the Greekness of refugees was not evident. Many refugees had to translate their Turkish family names into Greek ones or at least replace the ending -oğlu ('son of') with the Greek equivalent -idis. At the same time, the Greek press often criticized the lax morality and promiscuous behaviour of refugee women.17 For their part, the refugees, especially those of an urban background, despised 'native Greeks' as provincial and backward, and called them locals (dopioi), yokels (vlachoi), not with an ethnic but with a pejorative connotation,18 and simply Greeks (Ellines), expressing a feeling of cultural superiority towards them.19 Moreover, they criticized indigenous Greeks for their lack of piety and disrespect towards religion.20 As Yiorgos Giannakopoulos pointed out, 'the refugees' seclusion in specific villages or suburbs in major cities contributed to the retention of the specific cultural and social characteristics that compose refugee specificity. The trauma of the uprooting, the fear for their survival and the dream for an eventual return to the lost paradise impeded their integration into Greek society'.21

The appeal of the Communist Party among refugees grew especially after 1930 when it ceased to support the secession of Greek Macedonia. Subsequently a considerable part of its cadres were refugees.23 Its secretary-general Nikos Zachariadis was born in Edirne (Adrianople) in 1903 and participated in socialist groups before he came to Greece, whereas the leader of the Democratic Army Markos Vafiadis was born in Tossia (Theodosia) near Kastamonu in 1906 and participated in the labour movement as a worker in a tobacco factory in Kavala.24 During the German occupation the refugee suburbs of Athens were the main hubs of resistance, and in the Battle of Athens at the beginning of the Civil War they were the strongholds of the communist militias. On the other hand, a considerable number of the refugees supported the government forces during the Civil War.25

From this I can see that both immigration can be opposed because of religious or political differences, or because of economic and material reasons, and in the case of the latter the former can be used or even made up to suit a given agenda.

The reverse could also be true; people who say they support immigration for humanitarian reasons or because of ‘diversity’ but instead want the personal economic benefits, which don’t always benefit everyone.

In Greece to be fair, you had an intake of around 1 million into a population of 5 million. I would be amazed if this went smoothly.

Just twenty years later, their neighbourhoods would score the higher death tolls from the hunger winter of 1941. Kessariani, Kokkinia, Nea Smyrni - the dead piled to a greater degree there, which hints towards the existence of systemic obstacles for the Asia Minor immigrants to feed themselves during the Occupation.

Those were all Athenian refugee areas. If those were indeed hubs of resistance and home to the Communist Party I’m not at all surprised they suffered under literal Nazi German occupation.

PS. What’s the meaning of the title?

[Iskar]

The example of the Greek refugees in Greece is a strong case against mere "ontological otherness" as the driving factor. In fact, every group and every identity is no more than a, however widely accepted, construct used to organise individuals in our perception. Hence, it is not the "them being others" that makes us xenophobic, but we "make them others" by construing and ascribing identities. This is the flipside of individuals inevitably ascribing "sameness" to a convenient reference group to increase coherence and cooperation in the everyday struggle that paid off evolutionally. Wherever resources are really or perceivedly scarce people tend to even just subconsciously reduce their chosen group for cooperation and exclude the rest by "othering" so as to reduce the number of people that resources need to be shared with for survival (evolutionally) or for scraping by/making do/coping (in more modern terms).

Therefore, I do think that the feelings of "otherness" Aexodus describes above are real and genuine, but they are the effect, not the cause. In order to prevent massive cognitive dissonance between our generous and moral self-image and the (supposedly!) necessary reduction of the cooperation reference group we simply tend to "other" everybody else to naturally exclude them from the rightful recipients of our morals and compassion.

As such the crux of the problem of xenophobia lies in a fundamental mental struggle we have to endure: As individuals the only identity we can be absolutely certain of is our own (cf. Descartes), yet we need other individuals for survival. In order to achieve the latter we have for once to create a certain coherence that ensures a degree of reliability of the other individuals close to us to ensure our continued successful survival. And secondly, due to how our mind works, we need to simplify others and organise perception of other individuals into groups, as processing every other individual around us in full individuality would both cost us time we need for other tasks and make us too slow to respond to potential threads.

Hence we naturally and subconsciously evaluate, group and react to others based on a relatively low number of perceived traits. (This number of traits increases the closer we are to someone and explains why people can be friends with select members of another "group" while still being racist, xenophobic, mysogynist, homphobic, etc.) As such we have a natural propensity for construing groups and perceived group identities that we either identify with to create coherence or vilify to justify competition for resources.

The point where actual civilisation and humanism kick in is in recognising that mechanic we carry with us and holding universalist values against it - namely that every individual deserves in the case of doubt to be evaluated at a purely individual level by us, that individual dignity forbids us from judging people solely by an ascribed group membership or small number of superficial traits. It does not mean that we should waste every waking minute studying the individual characteristics of everyone we meet - quick and routine judgements on people and perceived groups in everyday life are essential to navigating an ever more complex world, but we should remember that culture and civilisation (and as a Catholic I include religion in that at least where I am concerned personally) allow us to be better than the mere biological setup we were provided by our phylogenetic history and should make us stop from time to time to question whether we are fairly judging other people or passing sweeping verdicts based on subconscious othering.

[Kritias]

Boi you just opened a barrel of 6ft worms.

I know, I know. I'm a masochist like that.

That conflates opposition to immigration with xenophobia.

Not really. The rhetoric for opposing immigration is usually xenophobic, so I take here the best possible case scenario.

Opposition to immigration or even full on sectarianism can be because of a number of factors, maybe any kind of combination, such as social, economic or political.

YES! That's my point. I am trying to do away with more uttered causes for opposing immigration such as they are unable to be integrated (even though they always are, and very successfully, as the new underclass pushing the older underclass higher - which, paradoxically is the reason you hear more established immigrant communities being more opposed to immigration, too, since it destroys their street economy that provided for them before the new immigrants arrived) or that they're unable to follow the culture (cultural invasion thesis).

In the Greek case, my Google search turned up this PDF that sums up the situation in one of the paragraphs.

This source is kinda oversimplifying, as if the native Greeks were predominately in favor of sparing the Six - and that's not the case. The immigrants were in favor of the Trial of the Six, yes, but their opposition didn't echo any different than the million of people who also wanted someone to scapegoat for the catastrophe. Imagine than hundreds of thousands of people coming from the mainland never returned home, and people desperately wanted someone to blame for the defeat. The government even proceeded with the trial and execution of the Six, even under very serious objections raised by France and the United Kingdom. Therefore, the initial hatred, I think, is a bit of a stretch, according to what I can see from the book titled Cultures in Conflict: The Compulsory Population Exchange Between Greece and Turkey. The Asia Minor refugees were as a whole treated as an underclass, it doesn't echo the modern stance of immigration where there's more or less a divide.

From this I can see that both immigration can be opposed because of religious or political differences, or because of economic and material reasons, and in the case of the latter the former can be used or even made up to suit a given agenda. The reverse could also be true; people who say they support immigration for humanitarian reasons or because of ‘diversity’ but instead want the personal economic benefits, which don’t always benefit everyone.

I'll give my thoughts on this a little later, if that's okay, when more people have shared their thoughts.

In Greece to be fair, you had an intake of around 1 million into a population of 5 million. I would be amazed if this went smoothly.

Is it the amount of people that's problematic, then? Even if the people coming in are identical in ethnicity, culture and linguistic background?

PS. What’s the meaning of the title?

It's the title of a booklet a refugee had published about their experiences in 1931. I felt it was appropriate.

[Aexodus]

Therefore, I do think that the feelings of "otherness" Aexodus describes above are real and genuine

Well sorry but my feelings toward residents speaking foreign languages is very much an earnest thing.

The rhetoric for opposing immigration is usually xenophobic, so I take here the best possible case scenario.

Is it? What are the usual examples of opposing immigration and why are they xenophobic?

[Kritias]

Well sorry but my feelings toward residents speaking foreign languages is very much an earnest thing. Is it? What are the usual examples of opposing immigration and why are they xenophobic?

Well, the feelings of un-easement about people speaking foreign languages is kind of xenophobic, wouldn't you say? What's the problem if two people converse in their mother tongue to each other, anyway? Are they aesthetically unpleasing to you, for example? Or is it that you kinda want to eavesdrop to make sure they are not threatening, which, as I said in the other thread is based on our common and very human proclivity to neurotisism? And why should you bring this up when discussing opposition to immigration par example? Also, as I have said, the different culture thesis is xenophobic.

To make this point, I'm going to share a personal experience here. I've been dating, for quite some time now, a person from N.Europe who, wanting to stay together, packed everything up, rented a place here and now I just-can't-get-rid-of-them. But I digress.

So, we're at an outing and I'm doing the whole cultural exchange package, right? I'm pointing stuff, I'm talking history, architecture, what have you. At some point we do sit to gobble down food like there's no tomorrow, hashtag the real Greek cuisine, and I can see a family seated next to us. Now, a thing about us is that we're kind of linguistically inclined, so when I understood that the family was talking about us, trying to understand what we were and what we were saying, I suggested to have some fun. English, German, French, Italian, Spanish in rapid succession, sometimes using different languages inside the same sentence. To our amusement, and their bewilderment.

Until the waiter came, upon whose arrival I order in my native Greek, and the family looses their color; during that whole time, they assumed we're tourists, but the girl more, the guy might be a migrant; but where from? They also kinda hinted that the girl was slutty, so naughty to date the migrant. And so on, and so on.

Now, since I've been spending some time with the SO, the problem is I started to notice the full parade of dirty looks, the comments, the winches etc. And imagine they look as European as it gets. The thing is, I don't get the looks. The SO is. When I am on my own, there's no "problem" what so ever; no one ever has spoken to me in English, par example, when I walk down the street by my lonesome.

So, to assume that these, clearly xenophobic views aren't represented in people's opposition to immigration wouldn't be truthful.

[Aexodus]

Well, the feelings of un-easement about people speaking foreign languages is kind of xenophobic, wouldn't you say?

The original quote was:

I would be lying if I said it doesn’t make me uneasy that four times as many people speak Polish at home than Irish.

If I overhear someone speaking Polish it doesn’t make me uneasy.

Don’t get me wrong, very very few people speak Polish or indeed Irish at home. The point was that there’s a lot of people from Poland.

[Kritias]

If I overhear someone speaking Polish it doesn’t make me uneasy.

Don’t get me wrong, very very few people speak Polish or indeed Irish at home. The point was that there’s a lot of people from Poland.

I misunderstood your original quote due to missing the nuance of the phrase 'at home' on the second read. It went over my head there. You're right.

Yet, I wonder why having a lot of migrants from Poland is such a big issue. Or whether it's the ratio that's problematic to you. To begin with, we have a lot of Polish people here, too, mostly employed in road construction (I know they are also similarly employed in roads in Germany, the Netherlands, and Northern Italy - is it the same where you live?) and people generally don't have any issue with the Poles here; but perhaps this is because Poles came in the early nineties, after the fall of the USSR, and we were more inclined to blame our neighbors, the Albanians, about everything to give the Poles the same attention.

The main question I'd like to pose is whether the issue is the congregation of Poles in the region because of their work, or the ratio of Poles coming to your country, or whether you'd encountered some people in your society specifically having problems with them? And why do you specifically bring up the Poles? There must be other nationalities around.

[Aexodus]

Eastern Europeans mostly Poles are really the only migrant group here. That’s because we didn’t get much immigration at all until the EU open borders stuff in the late nineties. It just seems wrong that there would be people living here speaking Polish. I also see England, USA, Germany etc and don’t want the multiculturalism there to be here in my lifetime. I also think that we already have sectarianism so more communities won’t help.

I’m a student so the economic stuff about immigration doesn’t really affect me hugely. However I used to overhear my Uncle who was a builder talking about ‘local jobs for local people, there’s nothing wrong with that’ so I suspect in construction there’s some issue there.

Poles are like 20% of agricultural workers I think for example.

[Iskar]

Why would it be wrong for Polish speaking people to live in Northern Ireland?

As for the 'local jobs for local people', how do you define 'local people'?

[95thrifleman]

I'm of two minds on this one.

I work in a town called Bicester in Oxfordshire, now we have a massive fashion outlet called Bicester village and a metric ton of bloody oap homes (feels like southern folk just dump their families more and more these days), both employ a great deal of foreign folk, mostly eastern european and the local taxis are almost all muslim drivers from Kashmir.

Now I work in one of the local supermarkets in customer services. I love the people who speak decent English and have good manners and get so pissed at the foreign people who can barely speak a word of the language and grunt at me. Does this make me racist and xenophobic?

I think it comes down to how willing a person is to speak the language and intergrate within society.

[Morifea]

@Kritias: Another great Threat, have some rep!

Germany has two similar events (of course not in the extreme scale as the events in Greece) in the last century, the expulsion of the ethnical Germans in the Aftermath of WW2 and the migration from eastern Germany after the end of the DDR.

In the case of the expulsion after WW2 it where around 5 Million Germans from Polen and 3 Million from the Czech Republic that where sent to a devasted Germany (around 60 Million inhabitants).
Those where, as written in the OP, from a similar culture, spoke the same language and had the same looks.
Those where also first met with pity, but this changed very fast, there are plenty of accounts of how the the newcomers where despised and scorned.

[Aexodus]

Why would it be wrong for Polish speaking people to live in Northern Ireland?

As for the 'local jobs for local people', how do you define 'local people'?

Isn’t this a bit of an unnecessary question? Local people are born and bred Northern Irish people.

[Iskar]

Isn’t this a bit of an unnecessary question? Local people are born and bred Northern Irish people.

So second generation immigrants are local as well? And people born and raised abroad by parents hailing from NI aren't local when they move to NI?

[Aexodus]

Yes, but no for the second. I knew an Australian girl with Northern Irish parents.

I mean if you moved here as a child and grew up here you’re basically from here I guess.

[Iskar]

What makes the second class of people local even though they do not satisfy your definition of being born there? Just the „blood“/descendance aspect?

[Abdülmecid I]

Indeed, the importance of cultural affinity has always been grossly exaggerated. It's not a completely meaningless factor, but it is easily overshadowed by the broader economic conditions. Concerning the example Kritias mentions, the alienation between the citizens of the Greek Kingdom and the Orthodox Christians of Anatolia and Eastern Thrace had begun even before the forced population exchanged. The correspondence and diaries of soldiers who participated in the expedition against the Ankara Government reveal that their morale was declining rapidly, while desertion grew. Despite the seemingly overwhelming popularity of irredentism, as expressed in Megali Idea, many soldiers (from conscripted farmers to officers) were looking forward to abandon the army and the Greek-speaking communities to their fate, as they were disgusted at the prospect of even more fighting for the sake of annexing isolated lands full of either Muslims or Christians, who looked suspiciously oriental and exotic to their eyes.

This approach has also been observed, when Bulgarians occupied the region currently belonging to the Republic of Northern Macedonia. According to the nationalist narrative of Sofia, the valleys of river Vardar were supposed to be populated by Bulgarians, who the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was violently trying to "serbify". The independence movement of the locals during the '20s and '30s had a notorious reputation and was responsible for the assassination of tens of royal officials. And yet, the Bulgarian administration treated them as second-class citizens and undermined their interests, by giving more privileges to businessmen and shopowners who had emigrated from Bulgaria proper. An even more modern and Balkan example, is the xenophobia many Romanian chauvinists show towards Moldavians, although the pricnipal goal of the former is supposed to be the union of the two countries.

Of course, the same tendency can also be observed among the immigrants, after they have succeeding in integrating into their new societies. Many researches reveal how willing are 2nd generation immigrants to vote for reactionary parties promising to restrict immigration. It may seem paradoxical, but the main competitor of newly arrived immigrants for low-paid and low-skilled jobs are native citizens of migrant ancestry. By the way, as the OP mentions Albanians, I remember watching a documentary demonstrating that a remarkable number of Albanians joined neighborhood patrols of "angry citizens", tasked to protect their homes against the threat posed by foreign criminals. For a more historical instance, some of the refugees of 1922-1923 developped a very harsh hostility against the only noteworthy religious and ethnic minority of Greece, the Jews. The National Union of Greece, the only Nazi party of some importance in the country was essentially present only in the second-largest city, Thessaloniki. Thessaloniki, in contrast to Athens, included huge communities of both refugees and Jews (mainly descendants of those exiled by Spain, Portugal and the Papal States and later welcomed by the Ottoman imperial authorities). As refugees and Jews competed for relatively undesirable jobs, like workers in the nascent industry or pot and domestic servants, Antisemitism grew respectively. This is why hateful bigotry against the Jews was also endorsed not by the conservative party, but by the Venizelists (centrism), who, for historical reasons, were the elected representatives of the voting refugees. The liberal and Venizelist newspaper Macedonia played a rather sinister role, by propagating the "blood-libel", in order to instigate several brutal pogroms against the innocent Jews.

From all this, I think we can safely conclude that flowery and rosy language about culture and religion matters little, when financial interests clash. Even nationalist and irredentist politicians have not hesitated to oppress their "liberated brethren", in order to exploit their resources and workforce. Elites aside, similar sentiments are also prominent across all the strata of the society, often leading public unrest between superficially homogenuous groups.

[Cope]

Isn’t this a bit of an unnecessary question? Local people are born and bred Northern Irish people.

Iskar is a mathematician; he likes things to be properly quantified.

[Aexodus]

What makes the second class of people local even though they do not satisfy your definition of being born there? Just the „blood“/descendance aspect?

Uh, because they grew up here I guess.

[Iskar]

Sorry, I meant those people that grew up elsewhere but with parents from NI, and only moved to NI much later in their lives. Would they count as local?