> There are 12 million stateless people in the world. Who are they? Without a country to belong to, many of these people lack some of the -- Matt Davis 26 August, 2019 Statelessness Shutterstock * According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the world is host to 12 million people who don't officially belong to any state. * People can become stateless through a variety of means, including racial discrimination, sexist nationality laws, voluntary choice, or bureaucratic accidents. * Who are these millions of stateless individuals? What is life like for them? Can their situation be solved? __________________________________________________________________ -- control, you can be denied an education, healthcare, employment, legal rights, any kind of identification, and many other things that your peers may have access to. Statelessness may live entirely in the realm of abstract bureaucracy, but it can have some very real and concrete impacts on your life. -- the first place. How do people become stateless? Often, statelessness arises due to the quirks of international law. For instance, many states offer citizenship based on either jus soli — where individuals born in a given nation acquire that nationality — jus sanguinis — where citizenship is inherited from one's parents — or some combination of the two. When these systems have cracks, sometimes the result can be statelessness. For instance, Canada offers citizenship through jus sanguinis, but only -- citizenship under Chinese law. As a second-generation, foreign-born Canadian, she was also ineligible for Canadian citizenship, and thus became stateless. Another major source of statelessness is due to sexism. Twenty-five states also don't permit mothers to pass on their nationality in the same way that fathers can, as is the case in Iran, Qatar, and Kuwait. When the father is stateless himself, unmarried to the mother, or has died, among other reasons, offspring in these countries suddenly find themselves without a nation. -- Others renounce their statehood or lose their statehood when their nation dissolves — as was the case for many native Russian Soviet citizens living in Estonia and Latvia, who suddenly became stateless when the Soviet Union dissolved. The main source of statelessness, however, arises due to states discriminating against a particular group. The Syrian government, for example, stripped hundreds of thousands of Kurds of their statehood in a 1962 census, claiming that the Kurds had immigrated illegally, and sparking considerable international criticism. Today, the Myanmar government is perhaps the biggest contributor to the modern stateless population with their refusal to grant the Rohingya people citizenship. The Rohingya have been present in Myanmar since the 8th century, but -- to intend to expel its Rohingya population. Notable examples of statelessness [json] -- German to Swiss back to German to U.S. citizenship. However, in between the years in which he was a German and Swiss citizen, Einstein was stateless for five years. Though he was born in the German Kingdom of Württemburg, Einstein renounced his citizenship in order to avoid military service in 1896. Five years later, he would be granted Swiss citizenship. Mehran Karimi Nasseri was not so lucky. He has been allegedly stateless since 1977, and 18 of those years he spent living in Charles de Gaulle airport. Nasseri claims to have been expelled from Iran, his home -- Though these examples highlight some of the more whimsical ways one can lose their statehood, most stateless persons suffer a significant amount of abuse because of their lack of statehood. The UNHCR has stated its goal to end statelessness by 2024 by a variety of actions, among them: * encouraging countries to change problematic laws (such as those 25 -- * improving the process by which states dissolve or separate. It's a lofty goal, but one can't help but to imagine that the stateless will always be with us. Related Articles Around the Web * Stateless in Europe: 'We are no people with no nation' | World news ... › * The Stateless in the United States - The Center for Migration Studies ... › * Statelessness - UNHCR › women population law refugees immigration government global issues