The Conditions of ‘Savages’? imperialist nation-state constitutes a space for politics even for its own nationals is an open question. Indeed, an even more alarming interpretation of the Dutch discouragement policy is that it is not an attempt to keep what Arendt called the ‘dark background of mere givenness’ invisible to the public eye, in order to prevent it from undermining the law of equality that allows the citizens to speak and act on the political scene, but that it is, instead, a cynical way of making visible the distinction between those who belong to the nation and outsiders whose presence threaten not the equal rights but the privileges of the insiders. If this is the case, countering the political production of the de facto statelessness of the members of We Are Here necessitates not just a politics of inclusion but of anti-racism. Reading Arendt’s right to have rights in the broader context of her critique of the nation-state, and confronting her repeated comparison of stateless people to ‘savages’, can sharpen our analyses of the contemporary production of statelessness, and help imagine a politics of countering it. 213