Transnational interlacements of statistical categories marking natio-ethnic-cultural “others” in Germany

Abstract Population statistics is a governmental tool to describe the composition of people living on a given national territory. For this purpose different categories are employed. These categories shape the discourse about natio-ethnic-cultural “others” and thus implicitly “us.” This article explores the influence of international statistics with the notion of transnational interlacements in the development of a new classificatory system for the population in Germany in 2007. The center of this new taxonomy is the concept of “migration background.” Using a hermeneutic reading of public policy concentrating on the microcensus and the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) I show that the new categories are strongly interlaced with the international studies on students’ educational attainments and fuelled by academic discourse on a lack of visibility of certain population groups in official statistics. However, the transnational relation is not preventing a definition which is based on ethnic German descent. It excludes persons from the nation, marking them as natio-ethnic-cultural “others” through the category “persons with a migration background” even if they are born in Germany and have German citizenship.