exercise of their rights because of their lack of nationality. Moreover, many of the people entitled to refugee status or a form of subsidiary protection, albeit being stateless, are not aware of the procedure for accessing the relevant legislations which could offer protection (Howard, 2017). Different routes are, in fact, set out in order to reduce and to prevent childhood statelessness. The Human Right Council has addressed the enjoyment of the right to a nationality and the avoidance of statelessness in several resolutions on “Human rights and arbitrary deprivation of nationality”: in particular, Resolution 7/10 (2008), Resolution 10/13 (2009), Resolution 13/2 (2010), Resolution 20/4 on the Right to a Nationality: Women and Children (2012), Resolution 20/5 (2012) and Resolution 26/14 (2014). Mostly, statelessness may be the result of factors such as political change (McInerney, 2014), expulsion of people from a territory (Ihrda, 2011), discrimination, nationality based solely on descent, and laws regulating marriage and birth registration (Milbrandt, 2011).
Conclusion
Borders are artefacts of dominant processes (Hayes, 2012) that have led to the fencing off of portions of territory and people from one another, but they are also an aspiration for individuals who are stateless. Longing to have borders for those who are stateless means claiming community through citizenship and nationality rights. Securing rights however, is not a straightforward and linear endeavour as legal loopholes in the current available legislation make it problematic if not impossible for stateless children to claim the legal safety that comes with having borders. Having borders for children who are stateless means access to education, housing and health care and legal protection from state and interpersonal violence (Policek, 2019). Borders, nonetheless, as this contribution has contended, are not simply practical phenomena that can be taken as given. They are complex human creations that are perpetually open to question. At an extreme, perhaps, existing borders are the result of processes in the past that are either no longer operative (Manby, 2012) or are increasingly eclipsed by transnational or global pressures (Li et al., 2010). In other words, borders are increasingly redundant, and thinking constrained by them restricts thinking about alternative political, social, and economic possibilities. It is paramount to change the way in which nation states think about borders to openly acknowledge their equivocal character (De Genova et al., 2014). In other words, a border should be seen not as that which is either fixed or as such must be overcome, but as an evolving creation that has both merits and problems that must be constantly reconsidered (Anderson & O’Dowd, 1999). Consequently, the reaction to what borders do should always be related to the overriding ethical concern that they serve and not undermine human dignity and what it is commonly understood as the right to a decent life embedded in the aspiration to belong to a community (Blitz & Lynch, 2011). From this standpoint, rather than reflecting an unambiguous sovereignty that ends/begins at a border or that must be overcome as such, border thinking should open up to consider territorial spaces as dwelling rather than national spaces (Brown, 2010). In this way, statelessness and the tensions between open borders and the claims of community can be fully addressed. Furthermore, political responsibility for pursuit of a decent life as extending beyond the borders of any particular state should be unquestionably granted to all human beings, irrespectively whether they have a state to call their own or they are stateless. Borders do matter both because they have real effects on individuals and their communities and because they trap thinking about and acting in the world in territorial terms (Anzaldúa, 1999).
When claiming community and borders for stateless children, the most common pathway is that a child’s birth is not registered in the country in which the child was born; that is, although the child may be entitled to citizenship, an official birth record has not yet been obtained (Allerton, 2014). Birth registration provides official evidence of a state’s recognition of a child’s existence within a country and as a member of a nation-state. It is the first and often the definitive step to citizenship and entitlements such as public education, health, and other state services (Ensor and Godziak, 2010). Often another scenario, pertinent to undocumented labour migration, is that a child is born in one country and travels without documentation across international borders to live in another country (ENS, 2015). Regardless of whether the child’s birth was registered in the country of birth, they lack citizenship rights in the country in which they now reside: they have become functionally stateless (Bhabha, 2011). This appears to be a common scenario for children who travel independently or who are trafficked, and for children of mothers and fathers who migrate across borders without documentation, and who often remain—with or without their parents—in the host country for a number of years (van Waas& De Chickera, 2017), rendering them functionally stateless.
As highlighted in this contribution, key hurdles associated with statelessness as experienced by children can be encapsulated in having no access to health care and in the lack of social and legal protection (Aird et al., 2002). Children are particularly vulnerable to negative sequelae of statelessness (Bokhari, 2008) because they cannot benefit from education, which in turn is translated into poor employment prospects, labour rights violations and ultimately poverty (Doná & Veale, 2011). Not having a national identity, makes children subjected to social stigma and discrimination. They are also vulnerable to trafficking, harassment, and violence (Policek, 2019).
In contexts of transnational labour migration, circumstances that have an effect on birth registration are mostly muddled by parents’ mobility within and between countries (Salter, 2010). Figures can only be estimated (Gibney, 2014) and, with ENS (2015) assessing that three percent of the world’s population are involved in documented transnational migration, some scholars (Sharma, 2006; Stumpf, 2006; Walters, 2010) put forward an estimated comparable scale of undocumented transnational migration.
Discussing statelessness and the need to have borders requires abandoning the either/or approach to borders that currently dominates most thinking about them. This approach does not redefine borders what borders “are” and “do”, on the contrary, by considering borders and bordering as instances of the same process, it not only brings to the surface their ambivalences and repositioning, but also the inexorable materiality of their linear inscription.
For those who live at the margin, for the redundant surplus (Mizruchi, 1983), borders do not only regulate movements of things, money, and people, but they also restrain the exercise of intellect, imagination, and political will (Ahmed, 2014).
References
Ahmed, I., ed. (2010). The Plight of the Stateless Rohingyas: Responses of the State, Society & the International Community. University Press.
Ahmed, S. (2014). The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed., Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Aird, S., Harnett, H., & Shah, P. (2002). Stateless children: Youth who are without citizenship. Youth Advocate Program International.
Allerton, C. (2014). “Statelessness and the Lives of the Children of Migrants in Sabah, East Malaysia”, Tilburg Law Review, Volume 19, Issue 1-2.
Anderson, J., & O’Dowd, L. (1999). Borders, border regions and territoriality: Contradictory meanings, changing significance. Regional Studies, 33, 593–604.
Andrijasevic, R. (2010). ‘From Exception to Excess: Detention and Deportations across the Mediterranean Space’ in De Genova, N. and Peutz, N., eds., The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement, Duke University Press, 147-165.
Anzaldúa, G. (1999). Borderlands: La frontera: The New Mestiza, 2 ed., San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Arendt, H. (1958). The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Balibar, E. (2002). Politics and the Other Scene, London: Verso.
Balibar, E. (2004). We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, Translation/Transnation., English
