Statelessness spread contagiously once some stateless people entered a country

Evidence

It was almost pathetic to see how helpless the European governments were, despite their consciousness of the danger of statelessness to their established legal and political institutions and despite all their efforts to stem the tide. Explosive events were no longer necessary. Once a number of stateless people were admitted to an otherwise normal country, statelessness spread like a contagious disease. Not only were naturalized citizens in danger of reverting to the status of statelessness, but living conditions for all aliens markedly deteriorated. In the thirties it became increasingly difficult to distinguish clearly between stateless refugees and normal resident aliens. Once the government tried to use its right and repatriate a resident alien against his will, he would do his utmost to find refuge in statelessness. During the first World War enemy aliens had already discovered the great advantages of statelessness. But what then had been the cunning of individuals who found a loophole in the law had now become the instinctive reaction of masses. France, Europe’s greatest immigrant-reception area, because she had regulated the chaotic labor market by calling in alien workers in times of need and deporting them in times of unemployment and crisis, taught her aliens a lesson about the advantages of statelessness which they did not readily forget. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 694

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how bureaucratic rationality creates perverse incentives — aliens chose statelessness to avoid deportation — which parallels later discussions of how states’ own administrative categories produce the very populations they fear.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the perverse incentive where becoming stateless becomes a rational defensive strategy against state power — does this mechanism reappear in postcolonial/Islamophobia contexts as ‘strategic’ identity?