20 Daiva Stasiulis imposed by law” (Sloane, 2009, p. 5, emphasis added). A test of “effective nationality” seems appropriate in the Budlakoti case, whereby genuine links in Canada, created in part by the state’s repeated treatment and verification of Budlakoti as a citizen for over 20 years, provide strong arguments for the “rerecognition” of his citizenship. The courts have also declared Budlakoti’s statelessness to be “premature” in that he has not pursued other grounds than birthright citizenship, such as “Special and unusual hardship” of Subsection 5(4) of the Canadian Citizenship Act. They also have suggested that Budlakoti should explore application for Indian national status or citizenship: they import essentialist reasoning to assert that since he was “born of two Indian nationals” this gives him “considerable connection with India” (Budlakoti v Canada (Citizenship & Immigration), 2015 FCA 139, para. 32, 49). The courts define Mr. Budlakoti’s legal status as not necessarily and prematurely stateless, arguing that his circumstances are not beyond his control. It can be very difficult to provide satisfactory evidence of statelessness as it requires proving a negative, the absence of a nationality. It is also unjust that some one who has had his life-long citizenship extinguished in the country where he was born and lived his entire life has additionally to undergo overwhelming financial debts and prolonged process to prove that he has no nationality (in this case in India). In the interim stretch of many years, his everyday life is plagued by the indignities and “protection gap” of de facto statelessness. Conclusion As the most abject “Other” to the citizen, the stateless serve an important boundary function for the state in securing its sovereignty and stabilizing its borders (Kerber, 2009, p. 31). The “stateless serve the state,” writes Linda Kerber, “by signaling who will not be entitled to its protection, and throwing fear into the rest of us” (Kerber, 2009, p. 31). The decision by the Conservative government to strip Mr. Budlakoti’s citizenship was clearly shaped by the motivations underlying its citizenship revocation reforms that “tethers citizenship revocation to criminal convictions” (Macklin, 2014, p. 29). By making citizenship alienable on the basis of a sliding scale of “criminality,” citizenship is no longer a right but a “revocable privilege” and is downgraded to an “enhanced form of conditional permanent residence” (Macklin, 2014, p. 29). Under the Conservative government, which stripped Budlakoti of both his citizenship and basic human rights, an application to the Citizenship Minister under the prior government was perceived by Budlakoti to be tainted by pre-judgments regarding his criminality as grounds for citizenship stripping and exile (Keung, 2013) Utilizing the insights of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the production of Budlakoti’s statelessness has been traced through heterogeneous networks Studies in Social Justice, Volume 11, Issue 1, 1-26, 2017