This dissertation examines the relationship between personhood, quantification, and governance within the context of the United States federal government’s decision to introduce a new category termed “MENA” for the statistical classification of immigrants with roots in the Middle East and North Africa region. I ask how the statistical framework of categorization and racial classification presupposed by the U.S. census configures and shapes problems of personhood, sociopolitical capacity, processes of identification, and the lived experiences of individuals from the so-designated “MENA” region. The dissertation evaluates the U.S. census as a semiotic and social scientific technology that has ontological and thus on-the-ground reverberations in contemporary America. I remain particularly attentive to contestations regarding the creation of the “MENA” category among state actors and experts —such as statisticians, demographers, sociologists, and political scientists as well as activists, advocates, and community members who negotiate among themselves and grapple with the dilemmas of this category’s adoption. In this way, I focus on the “MENA” category as an object of ethnographic inquiry and a matter of practical and political concern. The census has long exerted political and symbolic significance and figured as an integral part of representative democracy in the United States. Since the writing of the U.S. Constitution, “the census clause” or “the enumeration clause” has created and stipulated statistical quantifications of human life and distributions of political agency anchored in the situated specificity of race. The current revisions to the federal standard for the measurement of race and ethnicity underway at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) include a new “minimum reporting category” termed “MENA” for the classification of Americans of Middle Eastern and North African descent, defined as distinct from the “white” category. Addressing how census categories are themselves social regularities, I show how the “MENA” category is not grounded in fact, per se, but in the situated contexts in which individuals and collectivities find themselves. Throughout, I demonstrate how a category like “MENA” is not merely a matter of fact but rather, “a thing to care for” mediating a “relational-feeling” or “form-feeling” which underscores a comparative logic that tracks through the census classifications and categorization practices. These modes of classification and categorization, as I will show, have pragmatic and political meaning for those who inhabit the United States and its categories of concern.