Fighting Imagined Invasions with Administrative Violence Haitians in the Dominican Republic and ethnic Bengalis and other minorities in Assam). 5 One of the basic tenets of xenophobia include ascribing a group (the ‘other’) with negative traits in order to construct a positive vision of one’s own group by opposition. Such narratives follow a simple logic where ‘unless we hate what we are not we cannot love what we are’, or in the ultraconservative terms of Carl Schmitt: ‘we don’t know who we are, if we don’t know our enemies’. 6 While xenophobia centres on the rejection or the fear of a foreign ‘other’, racism represents the ideology by which humanity is divided into superior and inferior races, justifying the supremacy of the higher ones institutionally, socially and politically. 7 Within the realms of xenophobia and racism, the ideologies of nativism are particularly relevant in relation to citizenship. Nativism is a type of xenophobia more specifically engaged in the defence of the nation state, understood as a unity of culture, including religion, language and even ‘blood’ (following a racist understanding of biology and human evolution). The American historian John Higham described it in the United States context as ‘intense opposition to an internal minority on the grounds of its foreign (ie, “unamerican”) connections’. 8 In essence, nativism makes xenophobia a national project. 9 Indeed, the ultimate project of nationalism, in Ernest Gellner’s terms, is to make the cultural (here ethno-national) and political boundaries coincide. 10 Nativism has been described as ‘the practice of assigning values to real or imagined differences, in order to justify the superiority of the native, to the benefit of the native and at the expense of the non-native, thereby defending the native’s right to dominance’. 11 The concept is difficult to describe, as not all migrant restrictions are motivated by such ideology. Moreover, not all targeted groups can be fairly described as ‘migrants’ or non-natives (eg long settled minorities in Haiti, borderland communities in Assam and Rakhine State). This article however uses nativism as a tool to understand the ideological foundations behind the exclusion and denationalisation of the groups studied. The targeting of minorities that results in statelessness is often motivated by the mixture of nationalism, racism, and xenophobia present in nativism. Its rejection of those considered to be the illegitimate ‘others’, not deserving citizenship due to their alleged foreign links or inferior ethnicity despite arguable legitimate claims for it and strong links with the state, is sometimes directly engrained in citizenship legislation and policies. While nativism has been primarily developed conceptually in contexts of mass migration, it is a useful notion in scenarios where 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 The comparison does not include the whole of India, but rather the State of Assam, due to the relevance of its recent history to the matter in question. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (University of Chicago Press 1996), quoted in Peter Hervik, ‘Nativism and Xenophobia’ in James D Wright (ed), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed, Elsevier 2015) 796. Robert Miles and Malcolm Brown, Racism (Routledge 2003) 3–17; Michael Banton, ‘Debate: Racism Today: A Perspective from International Politics’ (1999) 22(3) Ethnic and Racial Studies 606. John Higham, Strangers in the Land, Patterns of American Nativism (1860–1925) (Rutgers University Press 1983) 4 (emphasis in original). David Haekwon Kim and Ronald Sundstrom, ‘Xenophobia and Racism’ (2014) 2(1) Critical Philosophy of Race 20, 31. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Cornell University Press 2008). Lindsay Perez Huber et al, ‘Getting beyond the ‘Symptom,’ Acknowledging the ‘Disease’: Theorizing Racist Nativism’ (2008) 11(1) Contemporary Justice Review 39, 42. 197