46 By-passing state power and neutralising state bureaucracies (2015:231–232), in considering citizenship as a filing system recording migrants’ return addresses, argued: If statelessness represents a human rights deficit, one view is that citizenship-any citizenship-fills the void. This view aligns with the statist approach to nationality, which trades on the formal equality of states. This alignment between statist and human rights orientation is compelling to a point, but it only satisfies the goal of perfecting the filing system. The alignment, then, between human rights and statist interests relating to border control may drive momentum to address the problem of statelessness. However, it can also mean that state interests and objectives that are not centred on human rights can be legitimised through the promotion of registration systems and technologies that are assumed to promote access to rights and services for marginalised populations (Brinham 2019). For example, state registration and ID systems as well as citizenship verification drives can be promoted as ways to reduce statelessness (Brinham, Tiwari et al. 2020; Manby 2020, 2021). Meanwhile, these identification and registration procedures can be used for the purposes of surveillance, oppression, and exclusion (Torpey 2000; Lyon 2001; Bennet and Lyon 2008; Breckenridge 2008). They can be used as bordering technologies to establish and maintain the hard borders of membership, as well as hard territorial boundaries (UNHRC Nov 2020). This tension between state ID systems as effective and efficient methods of governance on the one hand, and oppressive tools of surveillance on the other, is explored in a rich and developing academic literature (Caplan and Torpey 2001; Bennet and Lyon 2008). As I consider in Chapter 8, statist and human rights interests have further aligned with the global drive for universal state registration and identification documents. International development, human rights, and corporate interests have converged in the ‘legal identity for all’ agenda (Gelb and Manby 2016; Manby 2020). The growth in national and refugee digital ID systems has been driven by the SDGs, the World Bank ID4D projects, and growth of the private digital ID technology sector (ibid). The stateless person and invisibility The online marketing material for the UNHCR Campaign to end statelessness 2021 featured the translucent outline of a smiling man through which the reader can see a bustling city full of busy people. The caption reads, ‘I BELONG, no longer invisible, no longer stateless. Everyone has the right to a nationality. Act now to end statelessness.’ In this section, I consider how notions of the stateless person as invisible both to the state and to international agencies have gradually evolved to dominate mainstream international campaigns to end statelessness. I consider how invisibility constructs the problem of statelessness as being produced by state oversight or state neglect. As such, the role of the state in deliberately producing statelessness is largely by-passed. This can