74 Banal dehumanisation liberal norms if there are some occasions when some humans could legitimately be subjected to such treatment as part of the self-reproduction of that society. Shue argues that, once such practices become acceptable in exceptional circumstances, it is naïve to suppose that lawyers and governments will not use loopholes and specious reasoning to allow torture in this or that other instance. Something related is seen in the case of ‘unwanted’ noncitizenship and the conditions to which it gives rise. Those without a recognised relationship with a State may be without a clearly protected legal personhood. According to reports, this denial of the self is damaging, as are the physical conditions to which it allows people to be subject. The banal dehumanisation of noncitizens seems to facilitate the supposition that there is some category of ‘featherless bipeds’ towards whom such treatment is acceptable (whether because they are lesser humans or their existence is unacknowledged). This is deeply problematic for any theory that claims to be just according to liberal democratic principles. It also, as we can see, has not been narrowly applied, but instead, the banal dehumanisation has allowed the denial of any individual-State relationship to affect large numbers of people thereby rendered extremely vulnerable – and the extent of this expulsion has been allowed to spread. Where the assumption is exclusion, and the voices of the excluded are muffled, it becomes possible to exclude more individuals and to subject them to more abject vulnerability. Finally, it is important to interrogate who is constructed as unwanted. Contemporary immigration regimes imply that there are ‘proper and improper reasons to migrate’.47 This also includes implicit assumptions about the sort of people that could properly have those reasons. For example, consider the experiences of the protagonist, James, in Ra’anan Alexandrowic’s 2003 film, James’s Journey to Jerusalem, seen in Figure 5.3. James leaves his home in South Africa on the advice of his pastor to pray in the holy city of Jerusalem. The film follows James’s route from South Africa to Israel, and his journey in Israel. He finds that no one is willing to see him as a pilgrim, or his purpose as spiritual. Because of the way he looks and where he comes from, it is assumed that he must be hoping to work irregularly, to defraud, or to commit crime, and he is mocked when he tries to explain otherwise. Eventually, because of the way his relationship with the State system is constructed, he is in fact forced to work irregularly and to live according to those expectations. The language of noncitizenship can help in the examination of the multi-dimensional prejudices behind the constructions of irregularity. Dehumanisation and a special sort of vulnerability It can be tempting to focus on migration, but this is a red herring. As was shown in Chapter 4, even in examples that involved movement, it was not generally the physical movement itself that made people particularly noncitizen-vulnerable 47 Dauvergne 2008 ibid. p. 18.