This paper offers a critical empirical analysis of the policy terms ‘allochtoon’ and ‘autochtoon’, which have been used in Dutch public policy and administrative practices in recent years, as well as in general public discourse, to distinguish between people with a migrant background and those with a so-called native background on the basis of birthplace. Taking an interpretive policy analysis perspective, we present metaphor and category analyses to show the determining role that ‘place of origin’ has in the policy terms. The analysis includes a historical contextualization of the categories within Dutch policy discourse. The metaphor analysis focuses on the etymology of the terms, and the category analysis examines the taxonomy used by Statistics Netherlands since 1999. The role of ‘place’, and in particular country or land of birth, in these etymologies and taxonomies link to elements from ancient racial thinking, showing that ‘birthplace’ is a surrogate for race in this policy discourse. The analysis leads us to argue that the terms are inherently exclusive and that the exclusive work that the essentialist categories do is in marked contrast to the policy goal of integration.