48 Introducing ‘unwanted’ noncitizens democratic principles and forces such States to encounter people with whom they would rather not relate.22 Irregular migration is closely tied both to border controls and to the reasons people have to move. As such, an individual who is already vulnerable to the citizenist system of States may well move in order to reposition her/himself within it and so to alter the impact of that vulnerability. The vulnerabilities of irregular migrants are continuous with the vulnerabilities of those who do not move, including those unable to move. This can be understood in terms of a shared relationship of noncitizenship. Stateless persons I was born in 1990 on December 10th in Newcastle here in South Africa. In 1994, I moved to Kenya with my mum. When my mum was murdered, we left for Uganda. In 2007, I tried to allocate my citizenship. My potential target was to locate some of my relatives here in South Africa. On my approach to Newcastle, that was the first time I was arrested, because I didn’t have any legal document. From there I was detained for almost a month, then I was taken to the Repatriation Centre in Lindela. […] I have been arrested several times. I cannot even count how many times. Every time I’m arrested, I am assaulted. They can kick you, they can hit you. They can do anything they want, because you don’t have any rights. The only thing they can say: “Eish, we are tired of foreigners here in South Africa!” These arrests, I don’t think it is going to stop. Every time I’s being asked to identify myself, I cannot. But there is no solution to my problems. There is no country where I am known. […] People do not believe that on this planet there are stateless people, but I do exist: I am a stateless person. (Khumbulani Frederik Ngubane, stateless man in South Africa, speaking in 201423) Officially, a stateless person is someone who is not recognised as a ‘national’ by any State under the operation of its laws.24 The implications of statelessness 22 Movement as itself a noncitizenist act is examined further in Chapter 11. 23 Taken from the documentary film, Belonging, 2014, produced by Lawyers for Human Rights, South Africa, UNHCR and OneTwoDee www.youtube.com/watch?v=s07egavs3FM (accessed 14 June 2016). 24 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons 1954 Article 1(1). The number of stateless persons in the world is unknown. Using UNHCR and NGO data, the Institute for Statelessness and Inclusion estimates that there are more than 15 million stateless persons. It is also possible to take a wider definition, including also all who cannot call upon their citizenship, which makes the number of persons affected much greater. For a problematisation of the use of ‘national’ here, see for example Katherine Tonkiss (2017) ‘Statelessness and the Performance of Citizenship-AsNationality’, pp. 241–254 in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds) (2017) Understanding Statelessness, Routledge.