You are not non-existent, you are just taking another path where some things are &quot;easier&quot;(from locals perspective, it&#x27;s usually easier to get a spot at a good school) to achieve they are actually much harder to hold because you are out of the safety net.  Other things are incredibly laborious and some things are effectively out of your reach.<p>From techie perspective, think of it as dirty and quick hack. You are basically quick fix at the system, you don&#x27;t conform to predefined interfaces and you do not fell in any of the object categories but you still can interact with other objects. Because you don&#x27;t go from all the checks, some things are easier to you and you can run faster but at the same time you are out of any error checking mechanism. If you fail, you fail dirty and you can&#x27;t recover.<p>So when you are an illegal in a country, you usually have access to some things like education and healthcare(sometimes easier than the locals) but you may have incredibly hard time to open a bank account and anything that depends on you having a bank account(the things that are easy and hard depend on the country). It all depends on what paperwork is needed, sometimes you hack your way to obtain certain paperwork(I know a guy who is taking the metro for free, so he would be fined and they will send him a mail with the fine and he will use that mail as proof of address to open a bank account).<p>Being illegal in a country is very interesting beast. Some people, like the person with the most upvoted comment make it look lşke it&#x27;s a privilege but it&#x27;s not. Do you fancy to be an illegal? Burn your documents and pretend that you are somebody else.