International law made deportability a precondition for any legal status.

Evidence

Every attempt by international conferences to establish some legal status for stateless people failed because no agreement could possibly replace the territory to which an alien, within the framework of existing law, must be deportable. All discussions about the refugee problems revolved around this one question: How can the refugee be made deportable again? The second World War and the DP camps were not necessary to show that the only practical substitute for a nonexistent homeland was an internment camp. Indeed, as early as the thirties this was the only “country” the world had to offer the stateless. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 692

Categorization

• SEED: The internment camp as the only ‘country’ offered to the stateless is a striking image that could anchor an essay on how bureaucratic categories prefigure physical confinement.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that deportability is the hidden precondition of legal personhood within the nation-state system is a dense, invertible insight worth sitting with.