Banal dehumanisation 67 scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.’28 And, for those written out of formal citizenship entirely, the burden becomes even greater. Insiders, then, though excused from any default burden, have an obligation to react against dehumanisation when they come to recognise it, however banal it seems, and to seek it out when it is obscured. Invisibility and nonsensical deprivation While admitting that ‘Yes, as human beings [they exist] because they are present,’ the officer emphasizes that they ‘do not exist in the civil sense of the word’. (Kristy Belton, 2015, reflecting on comments of the UNDP officer in the Dominican Republic.29) Dehumanisation can also be existential. That is, rather than being constructed as less than human, persons are constructed out of recognised existence altogether. This results in the sort of situation described by the UNDP officer to Kristy Belton in the quotation above, such that some people seem not to exist legally at all. And yet there are some actions that a person must perform, even if the State in which s/he lives would rather that s/he did not perform them – even if s/he would like to comply. Consider Jeremy Waldron’s argument relating to homelessness. Homes and States are not analogous, but Waldron’s style of argumentation is useful here.30 In his examination of homelessness, Waldron himself explicitly mentions that he is referring to homeless American citizens in American cities.31 In one paper he does mention statelessness as a potential parallel,32 though he does not develop it and indeed seems explicitly to remove ‘undocumented aliens’ from the sphere of those who can count amongst the homeless persons under discussion.33 Taken from his various papers on the topic, and with some rearrangement, his core argument can be presented as follows:34 28 Audre Lorde (1984) ‘Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference’, pp. 114–123 in Audre Lorde (1984) Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, at p. 115. 29 Belton 2015 ibid. p. 911. 30 This argument is developed much further in Tendayi Bloom (2016) ‘Migration in a World of Citizens, Nonsensical Morality and Academia’s Role in Addressing Hidden Poverty’, in Helmut Gaisbauer, Gottfried Schweiger and Clemens Sedmak (eds) (2016) Ethical Issues in Poverty Alleviation, Springer. 31 Jeremy Waldron (1991–1992) ‘Homelessness and the Issue of Freedom’, UCLA Law Review 39; Jeremy Waldron (2000) Homelessness and Community’, University of Toronto Law Journal 50; Jeremy Waldron (2009) ‘Community and Property – For Those Who Have Neither’, Theoretical Inquiries into Law 10. 32 Waldron 2009 ibid. p. 189. 33 Waldron 2009 ibid. p. 185. 34 This distillation of Waldron’s argument is taken directly from Tendayi Bloom (2016) ‘Migration in a World of Citizens, Nonsensical Morality, and Academia’s Role in Addressing Hidden Poverty’, pp. 247–258 in Helmut Gaisbauer, Gottfried Schweiger and Clemens Sedmak (eds) (2016) Ethical Issues in Poverty Alleviation, Springer.