ABSTRACT
Over the past few decades, a new twist has surfaced in the politics of anti-immigration: the idea that people classified as migrants are “colonizers” of the native or indigenous people of any given “nation.” In this chapter, I argue that such discourses are unsurprising given the autochthonous basis of nationalism(s) that form the basis for normalizing nation-state power. Such discourses allow nation-states to establish limits to ideas of “nation-ness” through their policies on citizenship and immigration. In the process, those with national citizenship status are encouraged to view those classified by states as migrants as their “natural” enemy. I also show that such discourses have proliferated and intensified with the political maturation of neo-liberal policy reforms since the late-1980s. I examine the social, political and economic basis of nationalisms reliant on ideas of autochthony (or indigeneity) and offer a route away from the quagmire of territorial and imaginative states that constitute and separate people into two main biopolitical groups – natives and migrants – of the era of postcoloniality when nation-states have become the hegemonic form of state power.
