Introducing ‘unwanted’ noncitizens 55 persons to Red Cross support centres, 62 per cent of refused asylum seekers had been destitute for over six months.59 The length of destitution is often longer, with 31 per cent of refused asylum-seeker visits from persons who had been destitute for over two years.60 Other studies have suggested that less than half of rough-sleepers in London are formal UK citizens.61 This makes such individuals vulnerable. Forced to be destitute, to rely upon NGOs, religious groups and community members for survival, individuals falling into this category are not only vulnerable to the State, but thereby also to everyone within the State. Their personal security is compromised, as is their security of stay, such that they are constantly at real risk of personal attack or deportation. Such individuals are vulnerable with regard to their basic and less basic capabilities. While the example of destitute refused asylum seekers in the UK is quite extreme, this level of exclusion (expulsion) is symbolic of a more general form of vulnerability experienced by noncitizens. While many noncitizens are able to access labour and/or welfare systems, they are still dependent upon employers to support their visas, landlords to accept their documentation, and the State to continue, in its beneficence, to allow them to stay.62 If not, they become ‘unwanted’ and so vulnerable to new forms of exploitation which further challenge liberal norms. Refugees are often seen as the quintessentially ‘good’ migrants, and put-upon victims. However, before a person becomes a ‘refugee’, s/he is in a weird limbo, denoted by the makeshift title of ‘asylum seeker’. Given that people are assumed excludable, even excluded until they can prove otherwise, many asylum seekers are irregular immigrants (though by no means all). Except in the limited cases of refugee resettlement, in order to claim asylum a person must find her/is own way to enter the territory of the State where s/he plans to claim asylum. This may involve travel on a visa, but especially in cases of urgent flight, it may well mean travelling irregularly. Those who need to move urgently are likely to be unable to perform the administrative tasks needed for regular migration even in the case that such options would be open to them. Not all countries offer asylum seekers any protection or access to national systems – and where it is available, this access is often restricted. 59 Calculated from Kate Smart (2009) The Second Destitution Tally, Asylum Support Partnership Policy Report p. 6. 60 Calculated from Smart 2009 ibid. p. 16. 61 S. Fitzpatrick, H. Pawson, G. Bramby, S. Wilcox and B. Watts (2015) The Homelessness Monitor, England 2015, Crisis. Note that those formal citizens who are homeless may well also be experiencing activated noncitizenship. 62 This ‘enduring asymmetry’ is developed in a very different way in Chapter 6. The phrase ‘enduring asymmetry’ in this context comes from Jeremy Harding (2012) Border Vigils: Keeping Migrants Out of the Rich World, Verso.