question of political membership got subsumed under the theme of the governance of national insecurity (Wilmer 2018). Suffice to say that this phenomenon is not unique to the relationship between the Middle East and Europe. Far from integration into the European citizenship regime, the other stateless of European societies such as the Roma remain both inside and outside, host and guest. In this regard, through the parado ical paradigm of stateless citi enship (Molavi 2013), it is possible to examine not just the dynamics of exclusion of migrants, refugees and sans papiers but also unearth the mechanisms through which their statelessness is maintained. If we centre our analytical gaze on what appears to be a paradox, again as Arendt s notion of the right to have rights dictates, the actual provisions of citizenship that renders Europe s others stateless as a racialized and politically charged edifice become all the more visible (Canefe 1998). The passport is the most noble part of the human being. It also does not come into e istence in such a simple fashion as a human being does. A human being can come into the world anywhere, in the most careless way and for no good reason, but a passport never can. When it is good, the passport is also recognized for this quality, whereas a human being, no matter how good, can go unrecogni ed. Thus wrote Bertolt Brecht in his Refugee Conversations in 1940, deepl affected by his own experience of exile. The vital importance that a seemingly simple administrative act the issuance of personal identification papers could acquire cannot be more pertinent in the age of statelessness. As the most obvious symbol of this belonging, offering proof and recognition of one s status, identity papers are something that the stateless person, who emerged as an inevitable by-product of the nationalization processes that began in the nineteenth century with the rise of European nationalisms followed by their post-colonial reiterations, continues to lack (Rurup 2000). The tradition of exploring the relationship between statelessness and migration dictates that migration governance regimes ultimately set the parameters of the framework for international protection. Statelessness used to be associated with state succession, mass denationalisation and refugee flows in the twentieth century. However, irregular migration and forced migration were always the main source of the production of new forms of statelessness. Contrary to the claims of international refugee regime expanded by organizations such as the UNHCR, neither customary 5