Stateless People

Podcast Transcript

Over 99.9% of the world’s population is a citizen of some country.

However, approximately 0.06% lack citizenship in any country. The United Nations estimates that 4.4 million people worldwide are stateless.

They have fallen through the cracks in the system, either by mistake or by malicious intent.

For that small minority of people, life can be exceptionally difficult and dangerous.

Learn more about stateless people on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

We should start this episode by defining exactly what a stateless person is. A stateless person is not considered a citizen in any country. A stateless person has no nation to turn to for travel documents or legal certification.

A stateless person is not the same as someone who is not a citizen of the country they are currently in.

A Japanese engineer could be working in Italy under a visa agreement and would not have the protections of Italian citizenship. The engineer would have legal protections in Japan and would always be able to turn to them.

Being stateless is also not illegal immigration. Even if you are in a country illegally, you would still be a citizen in your country of origin.

Being stateless in the modern world can produce tragic consequences. Stateless people cannot obtain official proof of their existence or residency. The stateless are outside the most fundamental apparatus of the country in which they reside.

Most national laws mandate that stateless people live without a birth certificate, driver’s license, or passport. Without the most basic documents, the stateless endure great hardships and are trapped in their tragic circumstances.

Many governments deny stateless children access to education. Public schools and the funding that supports them are directed towards legal residents and citizens of a state.

Stateless children cannot prove their identity, so their participation in school is severely limited, as nearly every school system in the world requires a birth certificate to participate. Without an educational path, the stateless are tethered to unescapable poverty.

Securing a job without identification is nearly impossible. The lack of identification makes it challenging to secure higher-paying jobs, particularly given the educational deficits that stateless adults bring to the workforce.

The jobs available to stateless people are almost always limited to the informal economy. Informal jobs are almost always lower-paying; they usually involve inconsistent work that exists outside the formal economic structure. These jobs include low-paying jobs in agriculture, day labor, street work, and domestic servitude.

Compounding their economic challenges, the stateless are ineligible to open bank accounts, take out loans, or register a title.

The inability to vote or hold office constitutes the most significant political consequence of statelessness, as numerous nations with stateless populations deny them these forms of political participation. Particularly in the world’s “least developed countries,” this absence of political involvement represents the most profound disadvantage experienced by stateless individuals.

Perhaps the greatest crisis that stateless persons face is their vulnerability to acts of violence. Predators and armed groups target the stateless for violence as a result of their status within the community. Stateless people lack access to the system of courts and police protection that most of the world enjoys. Because stateless people don’t have a legal identity to use the legal system, they become victims of predators.

In this unfolding tragedy, targeted violence towards the stateless takes many forms, with sexual violence and human trafficking being regular atrocities.

So, how can this happen? How is it that someone can not be the citizen of any country?

Individuals generally find themselves in the plight of statelessness through either administrative gaps at birth or the intentional revocation of their rights by a state.

Statelessness can occur when a child is born in a country that grants citizenship only by blood, but the parents are from a country that grants citizenship only by birthplace.

This type of situation is more common than you might think; approximately 70,000 children are born each year in situations where their status is complicated by challenges to citizenship and national standing by blood and by birth.

One challenge in this type of situation is that many Middle Eastern and North African countries do not allow matrilineal citizenship. Mothers are not allowed to pass along their citizenship to a child.

In cases where the father is stateless, unknown, or has passed away, the child is born without the ability to secure citizenship.

Insistence on patrilineal citizenship is problematic in conflict zones.

At the height of the Syrian civil war between 2012 and 2020, there was a profound crisis as Syria passed citizenship only through the father. In the absence of a father to sign the child’s documentation, the child is not Syrian for citizenship purposes.

Compounding this problem was the fact that the civil war produced millions of refugees throughout Europe and the Middle East, many of whom possessed no formal documented connection to a state.

In other prominent conflict zones, such as the Republic of the Congo and Yemen, statelessness can emerge through bureaucratic chaos induced by the sheer volume of violence.

Courthouses and government buildings were destroyed amidst violence, making statelessness worse.

An example provided by the United Nations Refugee Agency tells the story of one person who fell through the cracks and paid a steep price for being stateless.

Meepia’s birth was never registered, leaving her with no legal status in Thailand, the country where she was born. Unable to provide identity documents, she was forced to leave school after the second grade. As an adult, she could only find labour-intensive farming work, for which she was paid less than US$3 a day.?She was also afraid to leave her village after being stopped and fined at a police checkpoint for not having an ID.

This type of statelessness is far less common than the formal denial of state sponsorship that many global communities face.

While statelessness can arise from unfortunate events such as shifting borders or an unregistered birth in a conflict zone, the most sinister cause of statelessness is a state-sponsored campaign of segregation.

Amongst the world’s many stateless communities, the most recognizable story is that of the Rohingya of Myanmar and Bangladesh. The stateless Rohingya have been called the most persecuted minority in the world.

The Rohingya’s story exhibits the challenging nature of statelessness in a region with a deep imperial history and ever-shifting borders and governance.

The establishment of Myanmar as an independent Buddhist nation in 1948 has created enormous challenges for the Muslim Rohingya community.

The most controversial part of the Rohingya story in Myanmar is how long the group has occupied the region. The Rohingya point to an arrival more than 1,000 years ago as part of trade networks in the region, but the view of the governments of Myanmar since independence tells a far different story.

The government’s perspective is that the Rohingya are part of migration amidst the British Empire in the 19th century.

Looking at a map of the region, it is easy to see why. Myanmar shares a border with both India and Bangladesh, the latter becoming independent of Pakistan in 1971 in a violent revolution.

Under British rule, the borders between the three regions were open. Workers migrated to where there were jobs. Workers often migrated at the orders of British economic interests in the region.

The British took the region by force in the 19th century through a series of three Anglo-Burmese wars.

The British viewed Burma as part of India, a distinction that minimized the Burmese cultural history. British rule in the region was marked by both direct control in the urban areas of central Burma and by leaving many of the frontier regions to govern themselves.

British imperial policy often used various groups, including local Muslims, to control Burma, which had a majority Buddhist population.

This imperial practice has created challenges across the world in the wake of decolonization; groups that had at one time held positions of power in the imperial order were now marginalized.

The state that is at the center of the Rohingya issue, the Rakhine state in western Myanmar, was under British control. The Rakhine region was of great value to British India for its agricultural production.

To take advantage of the region’s rice production, the British established open migration for people to work there.

The legacy of the British occupation are central to the crisis of the Rohingya.

British Burma became the Union of Burma in 1948. The 1982 Burma Citizenship Law established 135 “national races” that are eligible for citizenship, which specifically excluded the Rohingya.

This is a shocking exclusion considering that the Burmese population in 1982 was about 36 million people, nearly 1,000,000 of which were Rohingya.

The law effectively stripped the Rohingya of Burmese citizenship and any connection to a state, as it stated that to be eligible for Burmese citizenship, one had to be settled in the region before 1823, the year before the first Anglo-Burmese War.

The Rohingya were allowed to provide proof of residence prior to independence. However, providing documentation from more than 150 years earlier in a region that has been a persistent conflict zone and lacked the political infrastructure to maintain such records has put the Rohingya in an impossible situation.

The overnments of Myanmar view the Rohingya as migrants who arrived from the Bengal region of India and Bangladesh. They were agricultural workers who migrated to the Rakhine region during the British occupation of India and believe their history lies there.

The truth is far more complicated, and it has left the Rohingya stateless.

A military takeover in Myanmar in 2021 made their situation even more precarious as the regime targeted the Rohingya for persecution and violence. Representatives from the UN and Amnesty International have referred to the treatment of the Rohingya in Myanmar as a genocide.

Under constant persecution and an inability to participate in public life in Myanmar, many Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh, but the situation of the Rohingya in Bangladesh isn’t much better.

The Bangladesh government initially welcomed the community after the persecution intensified in 2016, yet that accommodation soon waned as the situation cracked under the economic realities facing Bangladesh.

In Bangladesh, the Rohingya are forced to live in Cox’s Bazar, the world’s largest refugee camp, which currently hosts more than 1.1 million people.

Life in Cox’s Bazar is tragic. The Rohingya live in a state of severe poverty, filth, and overcrowding. Food supplies are limited, and water conditions are dangerous.

The camps are not equipped to meet basic needs, and services such as medical care and education are impossible to secure amid the staggering overcrowding.

Bangladesh is unable to grant the Rohingya statehood or citizenship; it lacks the economic capacity to welcome that many new citizens into the country, which makes apolitical solution for Rohingya integration impossible.

In Bangladesh, the Rohingya are officially designated as Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals. This classification is a barrier to their integration into Bangladeshi public life, as the military prevents the Rohingya from exiting the camp, and they are prohibited from entering Bangladesh proper.

The stateless Rohingya represent the millions of people worldwide without formal recognition who face persecution as they live in the shadows of the modern nation-state.

Their plight is a stark reminder that in our connected, documented world, those who slip through the cracks of the nation-state system have no recourse and little protection.