"Go back to where you came from" is a racist or xenophobic epithet which is used in many different countries, and it is mainly used to target immigrants and/or ethnic groups whose members are falsely considered to be immigrants. In contemporary United States, it is frequently directed at Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans, and it is sometimes also directed towards African Americans, and Slavic Americans. There is also a common variant of the phrase that has been popularized by the Ku Klux Klan: "Go back to your country." The phrase has a long history which goes back at least as far as 1798, and it was primarily originally targeted at non-White Anglo-Saxon Protestant European immigrants, such as Irish, Italians, Poles, and Jews. The phrase was popularized during World War I and World War II in relation to German Americans, who were subject to suspicion, discrimination, and violence. The term is often accompanied with an erroneous assumption of the target's origin, as Hispanic Americans are often told to "Go back to Mexico!", Slavic and other Eastern European Americans are told to return to Russia, Asian Americans often told to "go back to China" even if they are not a Chinese American, and African Americans to "go back to Africa." The message conveys a sense that the person is "not supposed to be there, or that it isn't their place." The speaker is presumed to be a "real" American, but the target of the remark is not. Such phrases are deemed by the United States federal government and the court system to be discriminatory in the workplace. Their use has been accepted as evidence of workplace discrimination in cases brought before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a federal government agency that "enforces federal law to make sure employees are not discriminated against for their gender, sex, national origin or age." EEOC documents specifically cite the use of the comment "Go back to where you came from," as the example of unlawful workplace conduct by co-workers and supervisors, along with the use of "insults, taunting, or ethnic epithets, such as making fun of a person's accent," deemed to be "harassment based on national origin." (en)