The perpetual foreigner, forever foreigner, or perpetual other stereotype is a racist or xenophobic form of nativism in which naturalized and even native-born citizens (including families that have lived in a country for generations) are perceived by some members of society as foreign because they belong to a minority ethnic or racial group. When citizenship has been granted and yet the group of people is persistently viewed as foreign, the term alien citizen has been also used to in some scholarship describe these groups.
The term perpetual immigrant has been used for cases of migration, forced displacement, or other reasons for relocation, where no citizenship is possible despite the individual's long-term residency, wish to become a citizen, and even (though not necessarily) birth in the land. Furthermore, noncitizen nationals, or persons who hold nationality but not citizenship, have also been argued to fall under this stereotypical image. Naturalization laws vary, and some countries follow a rule of jus sanguinis in various forms. For example, Myanmar nationality law regards the Rohingya people as foreign.
Some countries have many refugees or other resident aliens with some groups, such as religious and ethnic out-groups of the country in question, often experiencing more barriers to citizenship compared to their in-group peers. A diaspora such as the overseas Chinese is often regarded as belonging to their ancestral homeland rather than to the country in which they live.
Part of the phenomenon where a person is of a separate nationality (and/or when considered different in the legal structure of the country, citizenship) from which they live can also be cases where the person is not seeking the nationality and/or citizenship of the country where they are, usually temporarily, living. Such persons are generally called expatriates, especially business expatriates or exchange students who live outside the country of their nationality for business or educational purposes, generally for a temporary period of time. They usually do not desire citizenship (given the choice in countries and time periods where there is one) or a change in nationality (whatever or whichever legal structure is pertinent to the country in question) and should not be confused with this stereotype.
Ancient history
Athens Like other Greek city-states of this time period, immigrants known as metics (Ancient Greek: ) came to Athens without a path to citizenship and could not participate in Athenian democracy. Recent scholarship has begun to examine Ancient Greek writings on contemporary sentiments of the day. It seems to show that people of the day were divided over anxieties around the intermingling and passing of these groups of people and the desire to continue to deny political agency to such members of society, while other contemporaries argued that such thinking was part of what turned democracy into a "noble lie".
Roman Empire In the context of the Roman Empire, the politics of difference has generally been considered by scholars to look considerably different than notions around modern definitions of race, as has been recently discussed by Greg Woolf on the Oxford University Press Blog. Instead, Roman slave owners worried that one could not tell the difference between the enslaved and the free peoples of the Empire. Examples of Roman paranoia include a story told by Seneca where the Roman Senate once debated about requiring all slaves to wear a particular costume, until they realized this would reveal just how many slaves there were in Rome. And Pliny is recorded as recounting an encounter where a senator while in the Roman baths was mistaken for a slave.
However, this is not to say that Romans were immune from distinguishing themselves on the basis of certain characteristics. Vergil once referred to his people as gens togata (the 'toga-ed race' or 'the people who wear a toga'). Often differences such as manner of speech, what people wore, how they ate, and other habits were the target of definitions of "strangeness", including but not limited to cases where Roman senators needed to change their speech before holding office. And this was not to say that the Roman Empire was entirely made up of European peoples. Sites as far north as England have shown the movement of different peoples throughout the Empire, including from Africa and DNA analysis of 2,000-year-old remains in an Ancient Roman cemetery show that at least one person was of East Asian heritage. As pointed out by Woolf, ways of othering were simply not along the lines of modern notions of racialization and that the relative lack of physical differences between those who had freedom in the society and those who did not was a source of anxiety amongst the Roman elite.
United States Recent scholarship and analysis of immigration and citizenship law in the United States is reckoning with the historical construction of citizenship in the country and its effects on different populations, most especially in the gap between the perception of foreignness compared to actual foreignness (when discussed as a process within current psycho-social theories such as in-group and out-group hypothesis can also be referred to generally as "othering" or "the process of othering"). In the work Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600–2000, Kunal M Parker writes:
The early history of the United States was marked by a period of ethnic and racially-based naturalization laws. The first naturalization act was passed by Congress on March 26, 1790, stated:
The law was updated on January 29, 1795, to a length of five years, but the rest of the act remained fundamentally unchanged. Citizenship hinged partly on the definition of being considered "a free white". Despite being challenged as early as 1857 in Dred Scott v. Sanford by Dred Scott and his wife Harriet, it was not until the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause written 1868 that began to take a significant step towards birthright citizenship
Scholarship studying freak shows in the 19th century and contemporary popular periodicals like Harper's Weekly and the San Francisco Golden Era were further used to illustrate who was, and who was not, an American. This exotification has been discussed as minimizing the individual, minimizing the complexity of their heritage, turning them into an object, and as having been used to further reinforce their 'un-Americanness'. Sometimes by direct reference, other times by indirect reference as has been argued with the Circassian Beauties who combined both Edward Said's description of Orientalism with a hairstyle similar to the 1970s Afro into a singular depiction of 'the other'.
In 1909 Armenians, Assyrians, and Jews were finally permitted exception from being barred from naturalization (as Jews had been in America since around the mid-1600s and Armenians since the early 1600s with Assyrian Americans being the most recent in the late 1800s) like other "Asiatics" and was announced in a statement from the New York Times that read:
Notably George Washington wrote in 1790 to the Hebrew Congregations of Newport, Rhode Island stating that the United States "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance". It should not be overlooked either that Jews have occupied a place where they've been considered white on one hand, yet not on another in the history of the United States.
In 1898, Wong Kim Ark, who was born in the United States, was denied re-entry in the United States after a brief visit to China, prompting a landmark decision in the United States v. Wong Kim Ark case where the Supreme Court declared the denial unconstitutional. American actress Anna May Wong, despite having been a third-generation American and born in the United States, was issued a special "Certificate of Identity", signed by an immigration officer that was required to be carried by all "Chinese persons" as of its issuance in the 1920s.
During the late 1800s there was a series of mob massacres of persons of East Asian heritage in the United States, including but not limited to the Los Angeles Chinese massacre of 1871 and the Hells Canyon Massacre of 1887.
For Indigenous Americans, the story of citizenship was (and is) a bit more complicated. Laws such as the Dawes Act conditionally granted citizenship upon acceptance of agriculture and individual land parcels, one of many forced assimilation policies. All Indigenous Americans were granted citizenship status on June 2, 1924, by President Calvin Coolidge in the Indian Citizenship Act, this act on one hand opened up voting opportunities and on another denied the sovereignty of the Indigenous Nations. Currently, many Indigenous Americans hold a sense of dual citizenship, recognizing both Indigenous sovereignty and their American identity.
A survey conducted in 2005 notes that the implicit stigma that 'white' equals American persists to this day. This correlation was also observed in a pop culture experiment where the American actress Lucy Liu was perceived as less American than the British actress Kate Winslet. Notably, all groups deemed less 'American' have all been denied citizenship status at one time or another during United States history. Additionally, naturalization barriers between 'whites' and other groups continue to persist. According to a study in 2022, non-Hispanic whites are still more likely to be granted citizenship status compared to all other persons, although studied in particular with respect to African, persons from Muslim-majority countries, and Hispanic immigrants, when seeking naturalization.
This stereotype has been popularly discussed as a negative stereotype of Asian Americans, but it has also affected other minority groups, which have been considered to be "the other" and therefore legally unassimilable, either historically or currently. In personal interactions, it can take the form of an act of microaggression in which a member of a minority group may be asked, "Where are you from?" It can also take the form of an explicit act of aggression in which a member of a minority group may be told, "Go back to where you came from." African Americans have been told "go back to Africa" as a racial insult, despite the fact that on average, they are more likely to have a multi-generational family history in the United States than European Americans are.
Furthermore, comments such as these also affect Indigenous Americans. In 2017 during a protest, "go back to where you came from" was ignorantly shouted at Indigenous protestors. American Cree comedian Charlie Hill was recorded as saying, "A redneck told me to go back to where I came from, so I put up a tipi in his backyard!"
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission defines workplace comments like "Go back where you came from" as a potentially illegal form of ethnic harassment. The message conveys a sense that the person is "not supposed to be there, or that it isn't their place," and it is often encountered when the minority person is "speaking out in predominantly white spaces."
Hate crimes, such as the murder of Vincent Chin, are described as the most brutal form of the perpetual foreigner syndrome.Wu, Frank H. "Where are you really from? Asian Americans and the perpetual foreigner syndrome." Civil Rights Journal, vol. 6, no. 1, 2002, p. 14.
Post-Soviet states