Banal dehumanisation 71 activities be outlawed for people whose relationships with the States that have the most power over them is unwanted and so ignored by those States. The problems with this go deeper than that which is uncovered by Waldron in his discussion of homelessness. In 2010, Joseph Carens warned that ‘… we should be wary of efforts to criminalise actions that irregular migrants take simply to live ordinary lives’. Carens explains that if a person needs documents in order to work, and needs to work in order to eat, it becomes nonsensical to impose even what seem to be ‘sensible laws intended to prevent fraud’ against someone using false documents if this in effect means preventing her/im from eating.38 In this case, the ‘unwanted’ noncitizen bears the brunt of the failure of existing political systems, based on existing political-theoretic systems, to recognise reality as it actually is. And, by being written out of recognition, such an individual is also denied official means to contest it. Speaking of detainees in Nazi concentration camps, Jean-François Lyotard observes that they were not spoken to, they were ‘treated’. They were not seen as interlocutors. They were not enemies because they were ‘not human’.39 An important part of the dehumanisation of ‘unwanted’ noncitizens is their constructed voicelessness, their exclusion also from institutions of expression. As will be developed in the next chapter, often even the realities of noncitizen politics are suppressed. This hides the ability of the individuals concerned to be interlocutors, or forces them to try to act as citizens or as victims in order to be interlocutors, and silences them if this becomes impossible. Despite this, as will be developed through the second half of this book, noncitizens, even ostensibly silenced noncitizens, are not voiceless, are substantively political, and in fact successfully challenge their constructed voicelessness in many ways. The comparison between homelessness as conceived by Waldron and the ‘unwanted’ noncitizens introduced in Chapter 4 also becomes useful because of the disanalogy. For example, while homeless persons do have access to public space in the city (even if activities are restricted), in the world as a whole, there is no globally public space. That is, there is no inhabitable land that has no State of some sort attached to it. In addition, the limit of the politics of recognition is largely drawn along State lines. The region with most claim to be stateless in this sense is probably the High Seas, though no one can stand there without a boat. Other spaces are similarly inhospitable. This means that leaving it to territorial States to decide whether or not to relate to a noncitizen (in the way that a home-owner can decide whether or not to allow a homeless person into her/is home) makes it theoretically possible and in fact the case that a person can be denied the right to stand lawfully anywhere on earth within a system that does not offer her/im the opportunity to consent to it or to reject it. The person’s political reality, then, is denied, as well as her/is physical humanity. S/he is rendered vulnerable in a particularly abject way to the State system. 38 Joseph Carens (2010) Immigrants and the Right to Stay, MIT Press p. 46. 39 Lyotard 1993 ibid. p. 144.