The idea of 'the foreigner'
Julia Kristeva argues that 'the foreigner' in a society provokes interest and fear in the 'natives' of the society, because the foreigner shows to us the ultimate 'foreign-ness' of ourselves. In her book Strangers to Ourselves she says:
To be deprived of parents--is that where freedom starts? Certainly foreigners become intoxicated with that independence, and undoubtedly their very exile is at first no more than a challenge to parental overbearance. Those who have not experienced the near-hallucinatory daring of imagining themselves without parents--free of debt and duties--cannot understand the foreigners' folly, what it provides in the way of pleasure ("I am my sole master"), what it comprises in the way of angry homicide ("Neither father nor mother, neither God nor master...").
Eventually, though, the time of orphanhood comes about. Like any bitter consciousness, this one has its source in others. When others convey to you that you are of no account because your parents are of no account, that, as they are invisible, they do not exist, you are suddenly aware that you are an orphan, and, sometimes, accountable for being so. A strange light then shines on that obscurity that was in you, both joyful and guilty, the darkness of the original dependency, and transforms it into a solidarity with close relatives of earlier days, henceforth forefeited. How could it possibly not have been understood that you were always with them, dependent on a past that only parents know, on the precious, exquisite pain that you will share with no one else? How is it that they, the others, do not know that your parents are still at your side, unseen witnesses to your problems with the natives?
Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to ourselves. Transl. Leon Roudiez. New York, Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1991. (21-22)