Reassessing Race and Ethnicity through a Migration Lens

Abstract

It is now taken as a given in the social sciences that race and ethnicity are constructed social categories, with situational elements that vary by individuals’ contexts. However, because of the role that state institutions play in assigning ethnicity, and reifying these categories from everything from the date they collect to their assignment of public goods, in practice social scientists still treat ethnic and racial categories as fixed. So, despite an underlying acknowledgment that race an...