Loss of citizenship reduces people to mere natural differentiation without significance

Evidence

The great danger arising from the existence of people forced to live outside the common world is that they are thrown back, in the midst of civilization, on their natural givenness, on their mere differentiation. They lack that tremendous equalizing of differences which comes from being citizens of some commonwealth and yet, since they are no longer allowed to partake in the human artifice, they begin to belong to the human race in much the same way as animals belong to a specific animal species. The paradox involved in the loss of human rights is that such loss coincides with the instant when a person becomes a human being in general—without a profession, without a citizenship, without an opinion, without a deed by which to identify and specify himself—and different in general, representing nothing but his own absolutely unique individuality which, deprived of expression within and action upon a common world, loses all significance. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 738

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core concept: statelessness throws people back on ‘natural givenness’ — citizenship as the equalizer of differences.
• XREF: Connects to the Islamophobia toolkit concept of citizenship/nation-state as the frame that confers rights; prefigures how exclusion strips personhood. — connects to: Framing natives as uncivilized precludes their equal citizenship. — , Stephanie B. Martens - Civilization and…, 86
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox — that losing rights coincides with becoming ‘human in general’ bereft of all specificity — is a dense, paradigm-shifting formulation worth sitting with.