[NZerFromHK]

Also a curious question: how do British/Irish descents view otehr white European Americans? In New Zealand there were reports of prejudice from British/Irish towards non-British/Irish descent European New Zealanders well into the early 1990s. I have observed that many people unsonsciously classify British/Irish and non-British/Irish descents even now.

[Clemenza]

Depends on the region of the country. Historically, Anglos and the Irish looked down on Americans of Italian and Eastern European ancestry when they first came to this country, which is why the immigration exclusion acts were passed in the 1920s, which favored Irish and English immigrants over Poles, Italians, Greeks, etc. The strongest prejudice against southern and eastern European ethnics was in the northeast and the upper midwest, where such immigrants quickly became the majority of the local populations.

After three generations, however, most southern/eastern European Americans have become indistinguishable culturally from their Anglo and Irish counterparts, many having intermarried. While it is true that in the northeast, ethnicity still matters (more as a recreational thing than anything else), much of the country is composed of what I like to call "new America" ie recently settled communities in the southeast and west where most white Americans moved from somewhere else, and everyone shares the same rootless identity, regardless of where their ancestors come from. Examples would be Seattle, Houston, Atlanta, and the entire state of Florida.

These day, whatever prejudice there is is against recent immigrants (Latinos, Middle Easterners, etc.). However, most of these prejudices are among older people, cultural conservatives and the lower middle class. Latinos and Asians face much less discrimination than my ancestors faced in the early 20th century.

I would say that with the exception of Brazil, the U.S. is the least racist country on the planet.

[Wallace T.]

America is different from the Commonwealth countries in several respects. The proportion of non-British Isles descendants among white Americans is far higher than in Australia, New Zealand, and Anglophone Canada. Intermarriage between British and non-British descent whites is far more frequent. As I understand it, Australians of Mediterranean and Balkan background are disparaged as "wogs" and lumped with Middle Easterners as less than white. In America, people of Italian, Greek, Croatian, Basque, and similar descent are considered white. We have had a Greek-American Vice President (Spiro Agnew) and two current Supreme Court justices and numerous governors who are of Italian ancestry. Additionally, the Irish Catholics who emigrated to the Commonwealth countries tended to be more loyal to the British Crown, while those who came to America were more anti-British. America absorbed the bulk of the Potato Famine refugees, who were mostly poor tenant farmers. From the time of the 1798 rebellion to the early 20th Century, this country harbored many Irish nationalist refugees. Eamon de Valera, the foremost Irish nationalist, was born in New York to a Spanish father and an Irish mother.