The German lands – a nation-state came into being only in 1871 – were a major world region for outmigration until the middle of the nineteenth century. This chapter tells the story of emigration from Germany, highlighting parallels between how German immigrants were treated abroad and how immigrants in Germany were, and indeed are, being treated. It begins by showing how migration had always been a reality for Germans. After that it turns to the United States and Russia, the two main destinations of emigration, especially during the mass migration in the 1800s, making Germans the United States’ largest ethnic group. With poverty and religious and political persecution as main push factors, Germans on the move were subjected to discrimination, even racism, physical violence, and pogroms. They reacted by hyper-assimilation or retreat into ethnic communities, particularly from the early 1900s onwards when hybrid identities – German and American/Russian – came under threat from homogenizing nationalism. This history needs to be remembered so that Germans realize how quickly history can turn around: once a liability, a German passport today is coveted by many, but this may change.

What "goes without saying," what’s expected (statistically or normatively), is often unmarked linguistically. What is special, distinctive, in some way seen as unusual, gets marked. For social kinds, this often involves adding modifiers or affixes to names of distinctive subkinds within an overarching social category – hyphenated Americans, for example. This can lead to the erasure of those distinctive subkinds in talk of the overarching category. So, for example, ‘hyphenated’ Americans can be ignored in some talk of Americans. It can also lead to erasure of distinctiveness among those not included in the marked subkinds so that, e.g., whiteness or maleness can be elided with being American or being human. Dominant social groups often have no distinctive labels since they become ‘normal’ exemplars of the larger social group. Subordinated groups can push back by labeling the larger default category and trying to get its members to label themselves, to acknowledge, e.g., that being cisgender brings with it a range of experiences and privileges not all share.