2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(1) world over seek to fast track the movement of investors and high-skilled workers while clamping down on the mobility of the lower-skilled. 37 Like globalisation itself, this has a temporal dimension — opening a path to permanent residency for the former while allotting temporary status to the latter — and also a spatial dimension, as new territories and spaces are put to work in the technology of bordering and defining political belonging. Thus migration management has become a governance tool for exercising the neoliberal exception, ‘pry[ing] open the seam between sovereignty and citizenship, generating successive degrees of insecurity for low-skilled citizens and migrants who will have to look beyond the state for the safeguarding of their rights’. 38 Critical migration scholars have pointed out the ways in which citizenship policy functions as a hinge to maintain a bifurcation between skilled migrant workers (who are afforded some access to social rights and entitlements and often a path to citizenship) and those deemed less skilled (who are given little to no access to rights or citizenship). 39 The stratification of rights and entitlements for those considered more or less desirable to the neoliberal state would appear to be by design. Citizenship rights, like sovereignty, were premised on boundedness; 40 so, the presence of noncitizens is a challenge to states. One of the technologies states are using to govern noncitizens is the proliferation of semi-legitimate or ambiguous status forms. Receiving states, through institutional and administrative governance practices, are creating new categories or ‘quasi-forms of political recognition’. 41 These ad hoc statuses, such as temporary humanitarian protected status or temporary guest worker, are a stop-gap measure that some governments use to bring displaced people into the documentary power of the state without granting full refugee status for all, in the case of the former, and a way to meet actual demand for migrant labour without providing a path to permanent residency, in the latter. While politically expedient, such measures often place ad hoc status holders in a prolonged period of structural ambiguity. 42 This raises their risk of sliding further down the slippery slope of citizenship, as delays and non-renewal of status or identity documents prolong and compound precarity over time. When women with such circumscribed status give birth outside their country of origin, host states may transfer this ambiguous status to their children, leading to an intergenerational risk of statelessness. 43 Creation of in-between statuses and precarious citizenship is not an accident, argues Noora Lori, but ‘a strategic government response to avoid resolving dilemmas about citizenship (especially questions about the incorporation of minorities, refugees, or labour migrants) by postponing those 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 Anne McNevin, Contesting Citizenship: Irregular Migrants and New Frontiers of the Political (Columbia University Press 2011) 2; Tanya Basok and Nicola Piper, ‘Management versus Rights: Women’s Migration and Global Governance in Latin America and the Caribbean’ (2012) 18(2) Feminist Economics 35, 38. Ong (n 31) 19. Anderson (n 9) 71–2; Shachar (n 3) 43; Nicola Piper, New Perspectives on Gender and Migration: Livelihood, Rights and Entitlements (Routledge 2013) 11. Anderson (n 9) 71–2; Dimitris Papadopoulos and Vassilis S Tsianos, ‘After Citizenship: Autonomy of Migration, Organisational Ontology and Mobile Commons’ (2013) 17(2) Citizenship Studies 178, 183. McNevin, ‘Contesting Citizenship’ (n 37) 9. Suzan Ilcan, Kim Rygiel and Feyzi Baban, ‘The Ambiguous Architecture of Precarity: Temporary Protection, Everyday Living, and Migrant Journeys of Syrian Refugees’ (2018) 4(1/2) International Journal of Migration and Border Studies 51, 54–7. Allison J Petrozziello, ‘(Re)Producing Statelessness via Indirect Gender Discrimination: Descendants of Haitian Migrants in the Dominican Republic’ (2019) 57(1) International Migration 213, 222. 142