ABSTRACT
It’s one thing to document the migrant experience, but, as many theorists have observed, the meaning of empirical data is never self-evident. 1 Empirical data have to be interpreted, and the way we interpret this data has as much to do with the conceptual frameworks we impose on it as it does with what we actually documented. It follows that there are some conditions that we won’t be able to see until we transform what we are capable of seeing. In the last chapter, I tried to do this by providing a revisionist account of the US racial binary. In that discussion, I drew attention to the way that nonblackness functioned as an intermediary category that obscures some important features of the migrant experience of race. But even this critical discussion has its limitations. It complicates the workings of the racial binary, but it doesn’t account for racialized native/alien distinctions that operate within a different field of visibility. This chapter begins to develop a theoretical framework for conceptualizing these native/alien distinctions.
