#Foreign Policy » How Being Stateless Makes You Poor Comments Feed alternate alternate alternate -- (BUTTON) Toggle display of website navigation Argument: How Being Stateless Makes You Poor How Being Stateless Makes You Poor... SHARE: Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on LinkedIn Share on -- Argument How Being Stateless Makes You Poor In today's world, a lack of citizenship isn't just a political problem — it's -- raised in Damascus. He speaks with a distinct Syrian accent, just like that of his many Syrian friends. But Khrtabeel is not like other Syrians. He’s stateless. The first time Khrtabeel, 30, grasped the magnitude of that word was in -- An estimated 10 to 15 million people around the world are stifled by the denial of privileges and protections that are afforded to citizens. The legal and political travails of stateless people are well known — many don’t have the right to vote, travel, own property, or move about freely. Access to basic health care and education is sparse. But one of the most debilitating (and rarely acknowledged) effects of statelessness is chronic economic instability. Without the legal right to work, the stateless find few avenues for upward mobility, leaving generation after generation to toil in poverty and obscurity — at the expense of both individuals and the states that host them. Often lacking government-issued identification, stateless people are typically excluded from the formal labor market and relegated to unemployment or under-the-table work. As a result, the labor they must -- dangerous and exploitative: the persecuted Rohingya minority in Burma, for instance, have been forced into unpaid military conscription. The desperately poor parents of stateless Hill Tribe children in Thailand have sold their kin into trafficking, ignorant of the slavery, prostitution, and abuse that await them. As Khrtabeel’s story demonstrates, even stateless people who have identification suffer widespread societal discrimination that limits their ability to find stable employment. As it turns out, some of the most pernicious consequences of statelessness have little to do with official state policies or geopolitical considerations. More often it’s a matter, pure and simple, of discrimination at the hands of ordinary people. In 2011, the U.S. State Department commissioned Middlesex University professor Brad Blitz, a leading expert on statelessness, to undertake the first study aimed at quantifying the economic cost of being stateless. After investigating the livelihoods of 980 stateless, formerly stateless, and citizen households in Kenya, Bangladesh, Slovenia, and Sri Lanka, Blitz’s team concluded that statelessness decreases both household income and spending by 34 percent, and home ownership by 60 percent. -- situations of poverty,” said Blitz. Blitz warns that the refugee crisis will exacerbate statelessness: “These children who are in protracted situations of displacement need the help, need the education — and time matters.” -- Africa. He was met only with rejection. Finally, in 2012, Khrtabeel found engineering work in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, where the stateless Kurds could commiserate with his troubles. Khrtabeel found the city uninspiring, but doubted he would find work elsewhere — so he stayed for three and a half years, until the encroaching terror -- discrimination plague him. “We know from existing research that to be stateless means that it’s harder to go to school” said Laura van Waas, co-director of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, an NGO based in the Netherlands. “It’s harder to complete school and get a diploma. It’s harder to work in the legal, public sector. It’s harder or impossible -- contract.” Although van Waas assumes the economic disempowerment of stateless populations comes at a cost to national economies, she said it’s difficult to grasp the magnitude of damage done due lack of research. She’s right about that. Currently there’s virtually no serious scholarly scrutiny of the toll statelessness takes on a country’s economy. Without the right to legally work, the stateless do little to contribute to formal economies via employment, taxes, and discretionary spending. The drain of these destitute populations may manifest in little more than a dent in the economies of large countries. But for a small state like Brunei, which has a population of under half a million and over 20,000 stateless people within its borders, awarding them citizenship could lead to a marked improvement in GDP. Studies on naturalizing undocumented migrants in the U.S. seem to support this hypothesis. Meanwhile, the stateless continue to dwell in the shadows — even in notoriously inclusive countries like Canada, where multiculturalism is embraced as a way of life and where refugees have been welcomed with -- won’t take you because you’re black, or because you’re a woman,’ it would be all over the news, and that’d be the worst thing imaginable. But if you’re stateless and you’re born into a situation you have no control over, it’s OK to discriminate.” -- valiant aim, but most countries continue to neglect the “invisible people” within their borders, refusing to collect data, let alone assign government-issued I.D. Only a few thousand stateless people across the world have identification cards acknowledging their status, according to statelessness researcher Bronwen Manby. The first step towards alleviating discrimination against non-citizens would be issuing widespread identification, thereby allowing them legal entry to the formal labor market — a move that would prove financially advantageous to both the stateless and the state. However, this assumes that states want to solve the problem. The worst -- sovereignty. Even if widespread policy aimed at integrating the stateless into mainstream society is adopted, it will take decades to wipe out the prejudice that haunts people like Gunster and Khrtabeel. -- different place.” Khrtabeel no longer sees his stateless status as a hindrance in the job market. Now that he is safe in the Netherlands, it’s a psychological issue he has to grapple with on his own. -- generation of our family [into the world] to suffer more.” In the photo, stateless Kuwaiti men from the Bidoon community sit around a fire in the ‘jungle’ migrant and refugee camp in Calais, northern France, on February 19.