76 Banal dehumanisation ‘unwanted’ noncitizens is not only vulnerability to a State. It also creates vulnerability in relation to other individuals (employers, landlords, spouses, etc.), as well as a more general vulnerability in terms of self-respect and rightsclaiming. ‘Unwanted’ noncitizens may struggle to obtain basic nourishment and shelter, medical care and education, but also police protection and access to legal justice. As this book will go on to show, this also relates to noncitizenship more generally – including that experienced by formal citizens. Feminist literature has highlighted the relevance of vulnerability, including vulnerability to, and dependency upon, other individuals, to thinking about political systems. Scholars within this tradition have examined the social structures that create vulnerability and have argued that a State built upon liberal democratic principles must acknowledge changing needs and address the changing nature of vulnerability that results.48 This has, for example, in turn driven new understandings of support for disabled persons and financial and other benefits for parents. These are persons who have traditionally been assumed necessarily reliant to different extents upon family structures, even dysfunctional family structures, for basic life needs. It is now widely recognised in liberal democratic discourses that structures that place a person’s basic interests in the hands of another individual enable coercion based on the threat or the reality of withheld basic needs. It is worth noting the power that the State can give in this context to some individuals over others.49 State institutions can artificially make otherwise independent individuals dependent on individual and collective others through the State’s citizenist institutional structure. Such individuals become dependent upon employers, for example, not only for employment (such that they could take their labour elsewhere if they wanted), but also for immigration documents, for example, when they are tied to a particular employer. Power over people by virtue of their quasicitizen, or lack of citizen, status is also given to landlords, who may be required or allowed to check a person’s documents and threaten reporting. When people are prevented from working and from claiming access to welfare systems, this risks making those who are already sick or physically weak, or those who are already vulnerable in other ways, more vulnerable. It also renders particularly vulnerable those who otherwise would not be. Such persons become unnecessarily dependent upon employers or charitable institutions, for example, for the satisfaction of their basic needs. As was presented in Chapter 2, this is contrary to a liberal political theoretical framework that 48 For example, consider the discussion among interviewees of the case study of ‘Francis’ in a Joseph Rowntree Foundation Report whose situation was described by one respondent in this way: ‘He has no control over his own destiny’; Suzanne Fitzpatrick, Glen Bramley, Janice Blenkinsopp, Sarah Johnsen, Mandy Littlewood, Gina Netto, Filip Sosenko and Beth Watts (2015) ‘Destitution in the UK: An Interim Report’, Joseph Rowntree Foundation Programme Paper, March 2015. 49 This is addressed in Chapter 10, where the lessons that can be learnt from the development of feminism are explored in more detail.