56 Introducing ‘unwanted’ noncitizens Two systemic responses suggested by theorists to address this situation for irregular immigrants are Joseph Carens’s ‘firewall’,63 creating an administrative barrier between migration enforcement and public services, and Christina Boswell’s ‘benign neglect’,64 whereby the State turns a blind eye to its irregular immigrant population. Measures like this could be vital to helping some people in the interim, but more is needed to respond to the more fundamental problem presented here. Carens’s firewall means that a State can at the same time consider some persons to be ‘unwanted’ and their claims illegitimate, while providing for those persons’ needs. Boswell’s ‘benign neglect’ is based on what she describes as the State’s source of effective legitimacy: … the state mobilizes loyalty and compliance through guaranteeing its citizens privileged access to certain political rights and socioeconomic goods. Even though states are not always able to guarantee this privileged access in practice, their legitimacy remains contingent on (at least symbolic) attempts to do so. The firewall and the policy of benign neglect are important for ensuring access to capabilities now, but they do not contest the methodological citizenism directly (and perhaps this is also what makes them such important interim tools). They offer interim ways to make the implications of citizenism less brutal. This book does not contest that there may be special claims for citizens, but it argues that there are also different special claims for noncitizens. While it is crucial to advocate ever more access to humanitarian protections and to citizenships, to more exceptions to the overarching assumption of exclusion more generally, it is also necessary to continue to challenge it.65 Even if every individual alive today were allocated some citizenship or quasi-citizenship status that was satisfactory to her/im; even if all individuals could satisfy their basic and even less basic physical needs using a combination of citizenships, quasicitizenships and firewalls; the possibility of completely excluded noncitizens renders the liberal democratic framework as currently interpreted, theoretically unjust, and likely to be unjust in practice as well. The reality, in which people are in fact experiencing utter exclusion/expulsion, makes this theoretical problem urgent to address. Irregular immigrants and stateless persons provide a paradigmatic example of how rights, usually presumed to be held by all, are also believed to be legitimately 63 Joseph Carens (2008) ‘The Rights of Irregular Migrants’, pp. 163–186 in Ethics and International Affairs 22(2). 64 Christina Boswell (2008) ‘The Elusive Rights of an Invisible Population’, pp. 187–192 in Ethics and International Affairs 22(2). 65 I am not suggesting advocates of the firewall or banal reject are not troubling the status quo, but am arguing that I do not think that these approaches solve the specific problems raised in this book.