Drawing upon the Ghanaian experience, this article argues that alien immigrant populations in some African countries were channeled toward socio-economic niches by executive decree and legislative mandate dating to the late colonial period. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, British immigration restrictions and trade laws designated the Lebanese as economic agents charged with promoting commerce, while encumbering their political acceptance by restricting residency and naturalization. After independence, economic populism, competing Africanist ideologies, and claims to indigeneity all shaped the passage of laws and legislation that defined and restricted the position of middlemen. Ultimately, the failure of Lebanese political integration in Anglophone West Africa stemmed from the states' economically-functionalist approach towards immigrants and the ethnonationalist discourse on autochthony that isolated them. This enduring institutional and statutory legacy explains why the political incorporation of many immigrant groups in Africa remains incomplete.Productive Aliens 99 dominant minorities in particular, subsuming both African "strangers" and non-African "aliens."This article examines the operation of these categories in British West Africa and successor states, with an emphasis on Ghana. The term "stranger" was used in West Africa to denote any foreigner, whether non-African or African of distant provenance. Legally, the term "alien" referred to immigrants from outside the British Empire during the colonial period, and to any non-Ghanaian national (e.g., unnaturalized Nigerians, Burkinabes, Lebanese, etc.) after the declaration of the Ghanaian republic in 1960. 11 However, in common usage, "stranger" effectively described non-Ghanaian African foreigners, and "aliens" tended to be reserved for non-Africans. This distinction was partly a holdover from the colonial period, when Nigerians and other British West Africans were recognized along with Gold Coasters as imperial subjects, and partly the result of Kwame Nkrumah's deliberate attempt to foster Pan-African inclusivity among West African diasporic populations resident in Ghana. 12