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'Migration background' has been an official category of population statistics in Germany since 2006 and has become an integral part of knowledge production about Germany as an immigration country. However, 'migration background' is not only a way of constructing 'migrant' and 'native' populations; it is also employed as a marker of ethnic inequality and often differentiated into subgroups to stand for national links or ethnic descent. I reflect on these observations as utterances of methodological nationalism inscribed into data practices and (non)knowledge production in migration research. I link them to ideas about statactivism (Bruno et al. 2014. "Statactivism." Partezipatione & Conflitto 7 (2): 198–220) as a means of intervention. I give some examples of how I have tried to destabilize the usual (non)knowledge production in migration research and reflect on the possibilities for individual researchers to do so. My ethnographic analysis is based on a close reading of national statistical reports, fieldwork in statistical offices, participatory observations in workshops, informal and formal interviews, and my own involvement in (non)knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classificatory systems and categories contradict structurally with mobility, because ordering systems define fixed places for people and things. Thus mobility challenges any form of classification and might be the driver for the invention of new categories. Regardless of the structural contradiction even classifications of mobility exist. They are strongly bound to national bureaucracies which themselves are a reaction to the need of national ordering systems. Bureaucracies are important technologies to rule nationally defined territories and populations. This leads to disempowering and sometimes paradoxical situations for mobile persons, because mobility produces systematically bureaucratic paradoxes. These paradoxes can be a helpful tool to analyze the making-up and contingency of classificatory systems and categories, to keep these characteristics transparent and hindering by this the naturalization of categories and classificatory systems. Especially in bureaucracies of nation states the awareness about this contingency has to be maintained, so that bureaucratic decisions do not lose sight of the persons they concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]