Introducing ‘unwanted’ noncitizens 43 With this in mind, this chapter also observes that, while access to citizenship is important, trying to address noncitizen-vulnerability only through the acquisition of citizenship and proxy-citizenship risks further entrenching some of the problems it aims to solve. Before launching into the chapter, it is important to make some notes. First, statelessness is not a migratory status. It may sometimes arise as a result of migration, but this is not the only mechanism.2 Statelessness can arise for example from administrative, gender and ethnicity barriers, from changes in State borders and changes in relationships between States.3 Crucially, a person is stateless because s/he is not recognised as a citizen by any State. Second, a person can enter the category of ‘irregular immigrant’ when s/he crosses an international border without (perhaps arbitrarily withheld) permission. But a person can also find that s/he has become an irregular immigrant without moving. This happens, for example, with the expiry of a visa, a change in relations between States, or perhaps as a result of a change or cessation of employment or an employment contract. In such cases, it is not the migration itself that is irregular, but how a person and her/is activities are or are not categorized within the State in question. Studying the situations for these two groups of ‘unwanted’ noncitizens is instructive, then, in terms of both their commonalities and their dissimilarities. Irregular immigrants ‘Illegals’ is not a noun. It is not a noun. […] what you can say is that it is an immigrant living illegally or that it is an immigrant living without papers or without documents in this country. But what you cannot do is to label a person ‘illegal’. (Maria Hinojosa, speaking to Steve Cortes, an advisor to then US Presidential Candidate Donald Trump on the television show MSNBC ‘AM Joy’ on 31 October 2016) Irregular immigrants are the quintessential ‘unwanted’ noncitizens. They are people with whom a State or States has explicitly tried to refuse a territorial (or any) relationship and yet who are manifestly in just such a relationship. The adjective ‘irregular’ is used in this chapter. A phenomenon is ‘irregular’ if it does not follow an expected pattern or some set of regulations, or goes against attempts at regulation. This provides a good description of the form of migration discussed here, and ‘irregular’ (as an adjective) lacks the value-ascription made by other terms often employed (such as ‘illegal’ or ‘clandestine’). Irregular migration might 2 See Caia Vlieks’s discussion of statelessness in situ and statelessness in a migratory context: Caia Vlieks (2017) ‘Contexts of Statelessness: The Concepts “Statelessness in Situ” and “Statelessness in the Migratory Context” ’, in Bloom, Tonkiss and Cole, (eds) 2017, ibid. 3 For example, Laura van Waas (2008) Nationality Matters: Statelessness Under International Law, Intersentia.