Statelessness destroys the structure of legal national institutions and inverts civilized values

Evidence

Much worse than what statelessness did to the time-honored and necessary distinctions between nationals and foreigners, and to the sovereign right of states in matters of nationality and expulsion, was the damage suffered by the very structure of legal national institutions when a growing number of residents had to live outside the jurisdiction of these laws and without being protected by any other. The stateless person, without right to residence and without the right to work, had of course constantly to transgress the law. He was liable to jail sentences without ever committing a crime. More than that, the entire hierarchy of values which pertain in civilized countries was reversed in his case. Since he was the anomaly for whom the general law did not provide, it was better for him to become an anomaly for which it did provide, that of the criminal. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 695

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how statelessness operates as an inversion of legal-moral hierarchy: the criminal anomaly becomes preferable to the unprovided-for anomaly.
• XREF: Connects to the theoretical toolkit of biopolitics/legal exclusion the reader is building; parallels Agamben’s state of exception and bare life which later Islamophobia readings assume.