It does not deal with numeric values, but rather we're talking about names or labels when we are talking about nations of origin. This variable is categorical and nominal. It is not ordinal as we cannot order the nations in any way. You could argue about alphabetical ordering of course, but that won't apply here because you could do that about any set of labels (eg: colors red,green,blue can be ordered alphabetically but intrinsically it doesn't make sense to sort colors).
