migrants. These three formerly British colonies are also the only contemporary countries in Southeast Asia with large Indian communities today (Pande, 2014). Further, in Myanmar, a significant population remains despite the fact that two major refugee movements back to India—first under the Japanese, and second under the military government in 1962, which expelled all ‘foreigners’—have occurred since (Hoerder, 2002; Ferguson, 2015). The racially-defined stratifications imposed by these migration policies, which largely left nonimmigrant communities at the bottom rung of society, have a particularly strong resonance in the formulation of the indigeneity clauses present in contemporary Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore and Brunei—the four contemporary states which comprised British Burma and Malaya. Today, those four states are the only four to include explicit indigeneity clauses in their citizenship laws. In all of those cases, Indian communities are excluded from certain rights and privileges, and are sometimes excluded from access to citizenship entirely, leaving them stateless. In the Burmese case, as mentioned above, multiple ethnic cleansings of Indian communities have been carried out since independence (Ferguson, 2015; Hoerder, 2002). Clearly, the impacts of colonial era migration were not resolved by the end of the colonial period. In fact, it is that precise temporal moment—the end of colonialism and the rise of independent nation-states—that must be closely examined to understand the contemporary situation. Above, we see that large colonial-era migrations led to and occurred alongside social and political changes, most of which were detrimental to the existing community. At the moments of independence, almost universally, a reversal of power occurred: ‘local’ populations who had been in control before the colonial period reclaimed power. Many of the initial acts, often written into inaugural constitutions as explicated later, sought to ensure power would not shift away again. Long histories of oppression by colonially-reallocated populations were responded to with clauses excluding members of those groups from rights, and in some cases citizenship entirely. Sometimes these exclusion clauses named particular ethnic groups, sometimes they were premised on religion, and sometimes on something else entirely. However, they almost always had the same underlying rationale for why the group in power deserved that power—an earlier claim to settlement in the territory. Given that tensions were highest with communities of ‘migrants’, the exclusion clauses were thus largely premised on the basis of migration’s antithesis—‘indigeneity’. Critical questions emerge here: when does a community stop being a ‘migrant community’? How is ‘indigeneity’ defined? Migration has always been robust and complex in Southeast Asia, putting into question many of the sedentarist biases that underlie concepts like ‘indigeneity’ and ‘the state’. It is impossible to avoid generalization, but I have tried to highlight some of the major relevant trends above. Given the long and complex histories of movement, ‘indigeneity’ becomes a somewhat relative concept,     13