314 D. Owen government of the Philippines would recognise them as citizens, and notwithstanding the inability of Aisyah and her brothers to attend Malaysian government school, the important point in their case is that they do not want to be Filipino citizens, since they feel they belong in Malaysia.52 Is the fact that Aisyah has no sense of any connection to the Philippines, even though she may be entitled to its nationality, sufficient to count as a valid reason for not applying for Filipino nationality? Given that the current constitution of international order grants state’s wide discretion concerning who to admit to citizenship, the immediate political stakes of this question are high. As the preceding discussion of citizenship deprivation established, a norm of state discretion subject to merely to constraint against statelessness is not a legitimate basis for international order. Rather the legitimacy of this political order requires that it acknowledges ius nexi as a basic constitutional principle and, hence, a human right to naturalize under conditions where a person has a genuine link to a state. This follows directly from the point made in the preceding section: ‘individuals are subject to arbitrary political domination if they have genuine links to the political community but remain involuntarily excluded from citizenship’.53 It is particularly important here to note that the forging of such links is not dependent on one’s formal migration status, rather, as Joseph Carens has long argued, a sufficient period of residential presence is sufficient for social membership, that is, the establishment of a genuine link.54 In this respect, the egalitarian pressures to expand the concept of de facto statelessness are a political artefact of the absence of a human right to naturalize; one that is given urgency by general vulnerability to public and private forms of domination to which migrants, especially irregular migrants, are exposed. 5 Conclusion: International Political Order and the Right to have Nationality Rights In addressing the right to a nationality, the right not to be arbitrarily deprived of one’s nationality, the right to change one’s nationality and the right to naturalize, the preceding discussion has drawn attention to both the centrality of the right to have nationality rights to equal membership in global political society and to the incompatibility of the right to have nationality rights with an international order structured in terms of a Westphalian view of state sovereignty. It should be noted though that this claim is not in any incompatible with the idea of an international order composed of self-ruling states; on the contrary, I want to conclude by showing that the right to have rights—of which, in any order of plural autonomous polities, the right to nationality rights is a (and plausibly the) fundamental part—is consonant with an international order of states. To do so, I avail myself of a recent position in global 52 Allerton (2014), p. 32. Bauböck and Paskalev (2015), p. 67. 54 For the most recent statement of this view, see Carens (2013). 53 123