Introducing ‘unwanted’ noncitizens 49 demonstrate, perhaps more than anything, the inconsistencies written into existing citizenist frameworks and the resulting vulnerability that can be invisible to insiders. Stateless persons may be subject to every sort of privation.25 Such individuals are extremely vulnerable to States and to the State system as they largely have no recognised place within it. This vulnerability may well not be accompanied by any mitigating protections, neither in theory nor in fact. As can be seen in Khumbulani Frederik Ngubane’s story above, which is not unique to South Africa, stateless persons can be caught within a State system that is not structured to acknowledge them. They may be arrested as irregular immigrants but cannot be deported to anywhere. They may be punished for not having documents while being given no means to obtain any. The inconsistency of this is also illustrated by Gohar Dashti’s photograph at the end of the last chapter, where individuals seek shelter in the desert, though they have no shelter and it is unclear how they will be able to live. While someone like Ngubane, quoted above, urgently needs access to a recognised formal citizenship, it is also necessary to recognise the claims of justice he has against the States concerned even without it. That is, stateless persons have liberal theoretical (as well as legal) claims of justice upon States, even as stateless persons. A stateless person also has a noncitizen relationship with the State(s) in question. Addressing stateless persons’ claims within liberal democratic discourse is theoretically important and urgent from a practical perspective. The language of noncitizenship can help. On the face of it, one could suppose that statelessness should not occur within a well-functioning liberal democratic system. But even in such a system there could be persons who were stateless (this is taken up particularly in Chapter 6). Irrespective of this, let us look at the reality of statelessness today. It can arise in a number of ways.26 For example, some ethnic groups experience inherited statelessness, such as the Rohingya in Bangladesh, Malaysia and Myanmar or the Roma communities in some parts of Europe. Some other populations, because of poverty, prejudice, or inefficient administration, may find it difficult to register life events, so that children end up unable to prove a citizen relationship with any State.27 This can also occur for other reasons. For example, laws in some countries which prevent mothers passing their citizenship to their children will leave children of a woman without a male citizen spouse unable to claim any citizenship. Children may also fall between systems of citizenship laws. For example, some States allocate formal citizenship mostly based on birth to citizen 25 This is detailed, for example, in Laura van Waas (2009) Nationality Matters: Statelessness Under International Law, School of Human Rights Research. For a theoretical analysis, see Kelly Staples (2012) Retheorising Statelessness: A Background Theory of Membership in World Politics, Edinburgh University Press. 26 For a comprehensive analysis see van Waas 2009 ibid.; van Waas and de Chickera 2017 ibid. 27 Zahra Al Barazi and Jason Tucker (2017) ‘Challenging the Disunity of Statelessness in the Middle East and North Africa’, pp. 87–101 in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Philip Cole (eds) (2017) Understanding Statelessness, Routledge.