To analyze these dynamics, the project will conduct an archival discourse analysis of post-9/11 policy and media materials—including Department of Homeland Security press releases, visa policy debates, and university recruitment campaigns—to trace how ideals of bodily and mental “fitness” organize racialized belonging. It will treat these institutional texts as part of an intersecting field of governance in which the state, media, and higher education construct the “good immigrant” through tropes of productivity, discipline, and emotional regulation. Drawing from crip theory alongside sociological approaches to categorical inequality and symbolic boundaries (Tilly, Lamont, Ridgeway), the project will conceptualize racialized ableism as a mechanism of stratification through which capacity and worth are co-produced. In dialogue with Jasbir Puar, Nirmala Erevelles, and Mimi Khúc, the project will develop what it calls a crip sociology—one that reinterprets disability not as an individual condition but as a social relation central to racial capitalism and citizenship. This framework will reveal how post-9/11 narratives of Asian American excellence reproduce ableist ideals of self-sufficiency while pathologizing disability, dependence, and refusal. By cripping the model minority myth, the project will contribute to sociological debates on inequality, race, and the moral regulation of difference, illuminating how the politics of ability continue to shape who counts as productive, deserving, and fully human in the twenty-first-century United States.