RE: "There are big differences between the situation of millions of Mexican immigrants in the United States and the millions of Kurds in Turkey."
Yes Mexican citizens living here ILLEGALLY and making cultural/language/etc. demands do differ. The response is even a bigger difference. While Ataturk absolutely refused to concede on anything (If you live in Turkey, you are a Turk. Period) we blench. Regardless what one thinks of that and Turkey in general IMO it fair to say that Islam in Turkey went through a reformation -- and the Army with popular support intends to keep it that way.
Thanks for that. I hope no one thinks I fail to see the problems with illegal Mexican colonists here (and that is how they should be viewed - colonists and not immigrants).
The difference is that in the Middle East, with respect to the Kurds, they never were the immigrants in the lands they now live in and in Turkey, the “Turks” who now rule over them were.
You made a point about Ataturk striving to establish a Turkish national identity over and above a Turkish ethnic identity. And, that concept actually has a large degree of truth among everyone in Turkey accept for the Kurds. In the majority “Turkish” population of Turkey, the genetic component suggests only about a 30% complement from the “Turks” from central Asia. That suggests it is the language and systems of the ruling “Turks” that came to dominate a society of predominately local people in Anatolia, and elsewhere where the Turks migrated and conquered.
And, yet, that is not true in the lands of the Kurds (whether they be in Turkey, Iraq, Iran or Syria), where genetically and in every other way they have remained “Kurds”. So they are not to me analogous with our illegal Mexican immigrants.
Some archaeologists and anthropologists see the Armenians and Kurds as cousins among “families” of ethnic groups. They seem to have some common and distinct root group that their ancestors shared.