Stateless People and the DREAM Act

As the White House pushed to pass the Dream Act this month, a number of relevant personal stories have surfaced in support of it.

They’re tales of young adults who arrived in America at a tender age, who grew up here and see this as the only country they’ve known. Yet as they become adults, they lack citizenship and access to the rights they need to become productive people. Fearing deportation or worse, they live in a limbo, not exactly Americans but not anything else either.

While many of these young people would be accepted by their country of origin, there are millions of refugees and immigrants worldwide who exist in a similar No Man’s Land but with no country willing to claim them as their own.

Considered one of the silent global human rights travesties, the predicament of the world’s stateless people is starting to come to prominence with the help of activists, NGOs and refugee groups here in the states.

A stateless person is usually defined as someone who is not legally considered a national by any country. How countries dole out citizenship is how they decide, whether right or wrong, who belongs and who doesn’t, and the stateless peoples of the world are the losers of this arbitration.

There are a variety of ways people become stateless: an ethnic group might be expunged from their home country, discriminatory laws might restrict birth registration, or nationality in a country might be based solely on descent. Without any citizenship, stateless people can claim few basic human rights and are often prone to being exploited by traffickers or treated inhumanely by their host government. They also are often restricted in their access to basic human rights such as health care and education as well as fair employment.

It’s estimated that there are at least 12 million stateless people around the world, and there is one group, the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic group originally from Burma, that some groups consider “the most oppressed people in the world.” Their story is emblematic of the insidious problem of statelessness and the need for the United Nations to strengthen and enforce the human right to citizenship.

As a Muslim minority they face severe discrimination from the military regime in Burma, now known as Myanmar, where they’re not considered citizens. They’re unable to to move, marry or find jobs without getting permits or paying bribes. To escape this persecution, nearly a quarter million Rohingya fled to neighboring Bangladesh in the 1990s.

Two decades later, about 200,000 live in Bangladesh cities but are denied official refugee status and are instead labeled “illegal economic immigrants,” making them easy scapegoats in an already poor country. Those who do have official status as refugees, about 30,000, remain in the camps where they live in crude huts with poor sewage and little infrastructure.

Children in the camps have access only to elementary education, and the youth are now clamoring for access to high school and higher education.

There are often horrific stories about the inhumane treatment of the Rohingya, such as when the Thai military removed the motors from immigrating Rohingya boats and set them adrift at high sea, killing some 500.

Some Rohingya, however, have found refuge in America and are trying to raise awareness of their people’s plight, to be a voice for a people without a home.

The Oregon Rohingya Society, for instance, is a grassroots group of refugees mostly based in Portland. They’ve held demonstrations in the city demanding basic human rights for their people and written to congressmen asking that they speak out on behalf of the Rohingya before the systemic prejudice they face results in another modern genocide.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms nationality rights, and two UN conventions on statelessness have long existed, but they are not widely ratified or enforced as only 35 countries have acceded to the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness.

Refugees International argues that the UNHCR needs to recognize statelessness as a human rights priority and more adequately fund and staff its efforts to curtail statelessness. Efforts from groups like ORS increase visibility and raise awareness, but, until the UN takes more action, people like the Rohingya will remain in limbo, without a home and without a chance at a decent life.

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