From statistical category to social category: organized politics and official categorizations of ‘persons with a migration background’ in Germany

Abstract

This article addresses the question of how and in what terms states constitute ethnicity and citizenship around statistical categories when these categories lack explicitly ethnic principles of classification. It does so based on a qualitative content analysis of the way that the German statistical category of ‘persons with a migration background’ is deployed in parliamentary debates on education. We argue that state actors in organized politics, who are embedded in Germany's national cultural repertoire and integration policy repertoire, transform this nuanced statistical category into a homogenized social category that is defined in terms of language, class and exclusion from the imagined national community. Our findings demonstrate that, in order to understand how the state uses statistics to draw boundaries within a society, it is necessary to go beyond the content of statistical categories themselves.

Keywords:

• statistics
• ethnicity
• class
• Germany
• migration background
• citizenship

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Some of the authors we reference distinguish between racial classifications (denoting a reference to phenotypical markers) and ethnic classifications (denoting a reference to cultural, national, or other markers). We use ‘ethnicity’ to refer to a range of identity markers, including pheonotyipical ones, although we are aware that this usage is contested.

2. In this sense, the works cited here are part of an even bigger literature addressing the relationship between ethnicity and nation-state building (see e.g. Marx 1998).

3. Modified from Omi and Winant's (1994, 56) concept of ‘racial projects’, we use this term to denote an ‘interpretation, representation, or explanation’ of ethnic dynamics that aims to distribute resources in accordance with these dynamics.

4. Aussiedler is the legal term denoting ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (particularly Poland and Romania) who have immigrated to the FRG since 1950, and who are automatically awarded German citizenship. The term Spätaussiedler applies to a sub-group of these immigrants who applied for admission after 31 December 1992 under stricter terms of entry.

5. All English translations were done by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Elrick

JENNIFER ELRICK is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto.

Luisa Farah Schwartzman

LUISA FARAH SCHWARTZMAN is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto.