Thomas: Well, I wanted to write about the central importance of the migrant in contemporary politics, but when I started doing the research it seemed that the migrant was always being theorized as a secondary or derivative figure. Across several related disciplines—Geography, Philosophy, Anthropology, and Political Science—the migrant was treated as an exception to the rule of already existing theoretical frameworks. What I wanted to show was that the migrant is not the exception, but rather the constitutive condition of contemporary politics. Right now, I think political theory has this backwards. Migration is historically constant—sedentary societies are the exception to this rule, not the other way around. So in order to theorize the migrant along these lines I had to invent my own theoretical frame work.