Legality is ascribed to nationality, collapsing class distinctions among migrants

Evidence

For the o≈cial, a middle-aged Punjabi, the ability to travel to the U.S. as a tourist marked his class di√erence from labor migrants, who travel out of necessity. In this example, the o≈cial filtered the anxiety that surrounds issues of legal status through transnational concepts that ascribe legality to nationality. Further, ascribing legality to nationality and citizenship creates a distinction between patriotic middle-class Pakistanis (the category with which the o≈cial clearly aligned himself ) and transnational working-class migrants who, perhaps, do not hold such clear national allegiances. This construction of transnational illegality thus disturbs the proper class performance of middle-class Pakistanis who have access to the pleasures of tourism by collapsing them into a uniform construction of the potentially threatening migrants. The o≈cial’s analysis of his personal experience traveling in the U.S. reveals an a√ective response to a complex gaze that could mean many things but that he tied to being viewed as out of place and to being imputed the status of illegality that working-class Pakistanis carry in the U.S. and across the diaspora. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 680

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how the state racializes entire national groups regardless of individual class — parallels the COMPAS / statistical discrimination literature and ‘model minority’ categorization.