of water and co-habitation with animals, combined with poor drainage and sanitation systems, contribute to a variety of medical problems, including skin disease, water-borne illness, upper respiratory infections and gastro-intestinal disorders. In one camp, only two working wells supply water to 650 families. In Mirpur’s Millat Camp, there was only one latrine for 6,000 people. Few medical clinics exist, and several camps have no health care at all, leaving entire families susceptible to both medical and related financial hardship. (2005, 15)40
The stateless are also susceptible to other health problems that can run the gamut of chronic illness, sexually transmitted diseases, and drug abuse to psychological issues such as depression, which sometimes results in “alcoholism, domestic violence and suicide” (Sokoloff 2005, 22). Stateless people are often prohibited from receiving government subsidized healthcare and insurance or in other instances do not receive complete coverage akin to their citizen counterparts,41 which results in higher percentages of stateless people suffering from treatable health conditions, such as tuberculosis, high blood pressure, and diabetes.42 Vulnerability to trafficking,43 as well as lack of education and access to health care services, also results in what may be “epidemic” proportions of HIV/AIDS among some stateless groups (Ehna 2004, 5).44 The problem is often compounded when the stateless are directly or indirectly denied access to antiretroviral drugs.45
Children are especially susceptible to HIV exposure from their stateless mothers who cannot always access government-provided HIV/AIDS services or prenatal care generally. Additionally, stateless children may also suffer from malnutrition and treatable illnesses. Lynch notes, for instance, that “Children without birth certificates cannot be legally vaccinated in at least twenty countries and over thirty countries require documentation to treat a child at a health facility” (2008, 12). Such limitations on these children’s ability to access health care can have far-reaching consequences: from the inability to obtain medicines for curing preventable or treatable illnesses to higher rates of malnutrition and even death.46
Beside health-related issues, the stateless often lack access to favorable labor conditions. Studies illustrate that the stateless are regularly channeled into “3-D jobs”—those that are dirty, dangerous, or degrading. Constantin Sokoloff explains, for example, how the Rohingya are forcibly employed by the Myanmarese army, without pay, “for construction and maintenance of [the army’s] facilities, as well as for a variety of other tasks required by the authorities” (2005, 21).47 The denial of opportunities to own land or property and the inability to access credit or obtain business licenses also affects their ability to work.48 As Laura van Waas notes in the case of Syria, “stateless Kurds cannot obtain property deeds, register cars or businesses, open a bank account or obtain a commercial driver’s license and in Bahrain, Bidoon have been prohibited from buying land, starting a business or obtaining a government loan” (2010, 25). Moreover, many states forbid noncitizens from holding certain public sector jobs such as that of teachers or medical professionals. These are just some of the possible problems that a stateless person may face within their state of birth or residence.49
Since international law deems citizenship the formal vehicle by which states extend protection to their populations when they are outside their own state’s territorial confines, the stateless also lack such protection. Moreover, although Article 13 of the UDHR affirms that everyone has the right to leave any country and return to his or her own country, the stateless often face great hardship when trying to reenter the state that they consider to be their “own” country because the latter does not recognize them as citizens under the operation of its law.50 Movement, both within a state and across borders, can therefore be highly problematic, resulting in one of the ironies of statelessness—those who lack a formal membership bond to any state through citizenship are among those with the most severely restricted mobility on earth.
This section has illustrated that stateless people, in general, are bound in numerous ways. Although the stateless are not forced to flee their homes in the same way that other kinds of forced migrants are, they suffer many of the same effects of forced displacement. They are, in Lubkemann’s words (2008), immobilized as their ability to carry out “key life projects” has been involuntarily—and severely—disrupted. Thus, while the issue of statelessness may not be at the forefront of humanitarian agendas or among the stories of the forcibly displaced that have come to our attention in recent years, it is clear that the stateless do suffer.
Macrolevel Repercussions
When one considers the domestic and international constraints faced by those without citizenship, it becomes apparent why international jurists, such as Hersch Lauterpacht, would consider citizenship to be an “instrument for securing the rights of the individual in the national and international spheres” (quoted in van Panhuys 1959, 236), and why citizenship is often considered “not one right but a bundle of rights” (Odinkalu 2008, 14). The violation of the human right to a nationality does not simply have individual-level repercussions, however. Its effects can also be felt community-wide.
For example, statelessness can affect regime stability in various ways. Earlier it was noted that democratization processes may sometimes have negative effects for certain minority populations when they are denationalized or denied citizenship for political gain. The flip side to this phenomenon is the inability of a state to consolidate a democracy. As Linz and Stepan assert, “The greater the percentage of people in a given state who were born there or who had not arrived perceiving themselves as foreign citizens, who are denied citizenship in the state and whose life changes are hurt by such denial, the more unlikely it is that this state will consolidate a democracy” (1996, 33). Virginia Leary likewise adds that “the exclusion of a group of people who reside within a given regime and who have little hope of regularizing their status and becoming citizens can be destabilizing domestically and challenge any regime’s ability to transition fully to a democratic status” (1999, 257).
Some interviewees for this study fear that the legal, political, and social exclusion of Bahamian- and Dominican-born persons of Haitian descent will escalate into a large-scale social problem in the countries of their birth. “We will have pockets of the population that are going to then enter into crisis,” says Francisco Henry Leonardo of the Centro Bonó. “They’re going to enter into a crisis and search for their own identity. Because, look, they feel Dominican, but they are rejected. So, ‘What is our identity?’ They are going to start a process of differentiation.” Altair Rodríguez, a Dominican social scientist, agrees: “It’s a time bomb. We’re creating a bomb. There’s thousands of kids being raised in bateyes without access to education, without access to basic rights.… So we’re creating a social bomb that’s going to explode.”51
These fears are echoed in the Bahamian case. Bahamian lawyer Dexter Reno Johnson proclaims that the situation “is a keg of dynamite, a source of potential social unrest of mammoth proportions”; “a critical problem that makes most other problems pale into insignificance since unless properly handled, this one could threaten the peaceful existence of the Bahamas, as we know it at any time, and for the foreseeable future” (Johnson 2008, 71, 72).52 An anonymous interviewee adds that the Bahamian government’s exclusionary citizenship laws are “creating more liabilities than assets”53 for the country and Mark Desmangles, born of Haitian descent in The Bahamas, observes how statelessness “affects economics. Because this is a group of people who cannot participate economically in the banking system, in the work force to give toward the economic well-being and the betterment of the community.”
Another anonymous Bahamian interviewee, discussing the problems associated with denying citizenship to children born of noncitizens until age eighteen, declares that “What you do in fact do is frustrate and alienate that person for 18 years. How does that serve the public good?”54 The Bahamas Constitutional Commission, which made recommendations to alter the Bahamian Constitution in diverse areas, including nationality, also emphatically asserts that it:
