Stateless people can be deprived of all legal rights regardless of any specific crime.

Evidence

One of the surprising aspects of our experience with stateless people who benefit legally from committing a crime has been the fact that it seems to be easier to deprive a completely innocent person of legality than someone who has committed an offense. Anatole France’s famous quip, “If I am accused of stealing the towers of Notre Dame, I can only flee the country,” has assumed a horrible reality. Jurists are so used to thinking of law in terms of punishment, which indeed always deprives us of certain rights, that they may find it even more difficult than the layman to recognize that the deprivation of legality, i.e., of all rights, no longer has a connection with specific crimes. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 720

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s toolkit around Arendt’s inversion of criminality as the last refuge of rights — resonates with later Islamophobia readings on criminalization as a path to legal status.
• QUESTION: Why does committing a crime grant a kind of legal legibility to stateless people, and does this mechanism still operate in modern asylum law?