Racism and xenophobia are consequences of the social closure that characterise fully nationalised societies. They are homologous to Arab extremists looking forward to the annihilation of the Kurdish population or of mestizo nationalists disdaining ‘los inditos’ in Mexico. In this chapter, another, yet closely related, consequence of ‘successful’ nation-state formation will be examined: the systematic discrimination between foreigners and nationals that is inscribed in citizenship laws and especially in the institutional machinery controlling and restricting migration flows.

Thus, we will no longer be concerned with those extreme forms of nationalism, xenophobia and racism, that are nowadays confined to rather marginalised corners of the public sphere, but with the institutionalised, overwhelmingly accepted and legally legitimated forms of exclusion. The discrimination against aliens is so deeply inscribed in the institutional structures of modern states and their legal machinery that it is not perceived as running against the basic principles of political modernity – rather, it is taken for granted as the way ‘things have always been’. Yet historical research shows that immigrants have not always been placed outside the home of modern citizenship. Their exclusion was a gradual process developing from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the mid 1970s.