States choose official labels for mass migrants that encode their intended outcome

Evidence

Official language coined specific terms, or reused already existing categories, to treat both groups as distinct from other immigrants. During the early postwar years, a variety of designations existed for the Germans from the Eastern territories, including terms such as ‘refugees’, ‘internal migrants’, ‘deportees’, or ‘returnees’. Yet when it became clear by the end of 1945 that these people – unlike the eight to ten million displaced persons from Western Europe – could not return to their former places of residence, the US Military Government of Germany started to call them ‘expellees’ (‘non-repatriable Germans from foreign countries and from former Prussian regions east of the Oder and Goerlitzer Neisse’) and ‘new citizens’ (Neubürger), denoting the goal of their ‘total economic, social and political assimilation in the German community’. By contrast, French authorities used the very term ‘repatriation’, (rapatriement) which had originally referred to military personal, displaced persons, prisoners of war, and other people who were brought back to their place of origin when military action ended. As the process of decolonization gained momentum, ‘repatriation’ became the official term for the (re)incorporation of French citizens from former colonies into metropolitan France. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 54

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my interest in how governing language manufactures categories of people — parallels colonial census labels and Czaplicka-era designations of displaced groups. — connects to: The state produces migrant illegality systemically to enable selective deportability — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in…, 653; The state takes multiple guises to regulate migration and bodies — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in…, 238; The state benefits from illegality by manipulating migrant labor through it (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the label assigned by the receiving state shape how the group itself consolidates politically (expellee versus repatriate identity)?

Broader Connections

• The state produces migrant illegality systemically to enable selective deportability #expands (0.85) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 653
• States use law to shape a specific type of citizen and civilization #expands (0.80) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 924
• The state takes multiple guises to regulate migration and bodies #expands (0.75) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 238
• The state benefits from illegality by manipulating migrant labor through it #complicates (0.75)
• States profit from the illegality they co-produce in migrant labor flows #complicates (0.75) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 666
• Legal migrants can be rendered illegal through social and cultural codes #expands (0.75)