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Theoretical error, real-world problems
is the only form of relationship a person can have with a State) or statusism (dis
crimination even in basic humanity according to status) meant he had to prove
some citizenship or quasi-citizenship in order to be acknowledged where he
lived. Esrafil could provide no such proof. Consequently, while physically
present, he was assumed to have no relationship with the State in question, and
sowas(tousethelanguageofa2007UKHomeOfficedocument),‘deniedthe
privileges of life in the UK’.5 Language is important. To construct access to the
means to satisfy basic human needs as a ‘privilege’ is to play with words.6
This overwhelmingly affects those persons who already bear the most burden.
Often, those who are assumed excludable must stay with particular employers or
spousesinorderofficiallytolegitimisetheirpresencethroughaquasi-citizenship,
backed up with the threat of deportation or non-recognition. This makes such
persons vulnerable to other individuals and to States in a way that is unknown to
those who only ever feel a full liberal democratic citizen relationship with the
State(s) that have most power over their lives. The recent trend towards ‘denation
alisations’, both on a large scale such as in the Dominican Republic, and in numer
ous one-off cases, for example on terrorism grounds, in European countries, help
to demonstrate the intersections of citizen and noncitizen forms of vulnerability.7
Second, noncitizens bear burdens at State borders. Each of us is asked to
prove our own exception to the assumption of exclusion at a State border
(outside of Schengen8 or other localised agreements). For many, this can seem
like a mere formality: the ritual showing of archaic documents. For others, this is
a site at which the noncitizen relationship is symbolically activated. For entry, it
is important to prove that a particular individual human being is associated with
5 UKHomeOffice(2007)Enforcing the Rules,HerMajesty’sStationaryOffice.
6 See critiques of ‘earned citizenship’. Ayelet Shachar criticises this as a property-like way to under
stand citizenship, rather than her preferred connectedness: Ayelet Shachar (2013) ‘Earned Citizen
ship: Property Lessons from Immigration Reform’, Article 2, Yale Journal of Law and the
Humanities 23(1). Theodora Kostakopoulou critiques earned citizenship as a special condition for
migrantsinTheodoraKostakopoulou(2014)‘Mobility,CitizenshipandMigrationinaPost-Crisis
Europe’, Instituto Affari Internazionali, No. 9, June 2014.
7 Jillian Blake (2017) ‘Race Based Statelessness in the Dominican Republic’, in Tendayi Bloom,
Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds) (2017) Understanding Statelessness, Routledge. I
developthisparticularlyinChapter3.SandraMantu(2015)Contingent Citizenship: The Law and
Practice of Citizenship Deprivation in International, European and National Perspectives, Brill.
MatthewGibneyrelatesthistobanishment,whileKristyBeltonreferstoitasin situ displacement.
Matthew Gibney (2013) ‘Should Citizenship Be Conditional? The Ethics of Denationalization’,
pp. 646–658 in Journal of Politics 75(3); Kristy Belton (2015) ‘Rooted Displacement: The
Paradox of Belonging Among Stateless People’, pp. 907–921 in Citizenship Studies 19(8). Kather
ine Tonkiss problematises the assumed integration of nationality and citizenship inherent in this term.
See Katherine Tonkiss (2017) ‘Statelessness and the Performance of Citizenship-As-Nationality’ in
Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds) (2017) Understanding Statelessness,
Routledge. This is revisited in Chapter 4.
8 ‘Schengen’ here refers to the European zone of free movement, named after the city in Luxem
bourg where the treaty which created it was signed in 1985. Within the Schengen area travellers,
in theory at least, do not need to produce documents in order to cross international borders.