This panel is about the politics of ethnic leveraging – a social and political process through which members of a status majority group elevate one minority group in a way that isolates and represses another.  We have developed this concept to capture a form of boundary creation and maintenance that is common in diverse societies.  Ethnic leveraging is now evident in many European debates over immigrant-origin populations.  For instance, populist Dutch parties publicly sympathize with gays who have been targeted by Muslims, claiming one historically marginalized group as part of the national community while stigmatizing another.  The process also operates in tandem with gender dynamics, such as when political elites in France reach out to Muslim women as victims of Muslim men.  Although Muslims are often the targets of socio-ethnic leveraging in Europe, examples of these processes can be found more widely. In the United States, East Asians are often referred to as a “model minority” vis-a-vis blacks or Latinos.  And historically, privileged whites in the U.S. sought to build white racial solidarity across class lines by way of a pervasive and vicious devaluing of African Americans.  Our panel will explore several case studies of ethnic leveraging from Europe and the United States in order to better develop this concept and understand some of the political dynamics around it.  We are interested in understanding who engages in leveraging, the conditions under which leveraging occurs, the forms that it takes, and some of its political conquences.