ABSTRACT
Immigration and geopolitics are usually treated as separate topics of study, and only a few scholars have used the term 'geopolitics of migration'. American politicians and academics in the early 20th century, for instance, endlessly debated the suitability of immigrants for membership in the American polity in terms of their assimilability. The functioning of capitalist economies requires the mobility of labour, political actors and economic interests within nation-states routinely stimulate the movement of both skilled and unskilled workers across borders. The process of solidifying political-territorial boundaries is profoundly racialised, resting as it does on the formulation of exclusionary and essentialist notions of national identity and belonging. Assimilation, in a sense, should be interpreted, in part, as a geopolitical discourse through which political actors make sense of 'our place' in a wider system of political, cultural, and territorial entities. The hundreds of thousands of Arab immigrants in America occupy a particularly uneasy place in this geopolitical vision of the world.
