#bidoon

a deep dive into the nightmare of having no country

most Americans can't imagine being stateless. let me explain what Trump's order would actually create by looking at stateless people worldwide.

THE CURRENT GLOBAL CRISIS

Right now, worldwide:

12 million+ people are stateless

1 in 3 are children

Every 10 minutes, a child is born stateless

Most common in: Syria, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand

WHAT STATELESSNESS MEANS PRACTICALLY

You cannot:

✗ Get a passport

✗ Open a bank account

✗ Get legally married

✗ Register your children's births

✗ Get a driver's license

✗ Access healthcare (non-emergency)

✗ Enroll in higher education

✗ Get a legal job

✗ Own property

✗ Travel legally

✗ Vote

✗ Access courts for protection

You basically don't exist as a legal person.

THE BIDOON OF KUWAIT

Perfect example of generational statelessness:

100,000+ people in Kuwait

Lived there for generations

When Kuwait became independent (1961), they didn't register

Now their grandchildren are still stateless

Can't work legally, marry legally, or leave

Exist in permanent limbo

This is what Trump wants to create in America.

THE ROHINGYA MODEL

Myanmar stripped citizenship from Rohingya people:

Said they were "actually Bangladeshi"

Bangladesh said "no they're not"

Result: 1+ million stateless people

Led to genocide and mass exile

Still stateless in refugee camps

Sound familiar? "They're not really American..."

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC / HAITI SITUATION

In 2013, Dominican Republic ruled:

Children of undocumented Haitians aren't citizens

Retroactive to 1929

200,000+ people suddenly stateless

Four generations lost citizenship overnight

International condemnation, still unchanged

Trump's order = same thing, bigger scale.

THE DAILY REALITY FOR STATELESS KIDS

Based on UNHCR documentation:

Maria, 8, stateless in Netherlands:

Can't go on school trips (no travel docs)

Can't join sports teams (need ID)

Friends don't understand why she's "different"

Parents can't explain what she did wrong

Depression and anxiety from age 6

Ahmed, 16, stateless in Germany:

Accepted to university

Can't enroll without citizenship docs

Can't get student visa anywhere else

Works illegally in restaurant

Brilliant kid, wasted potential

THE HEALTHCARE NIGHTMARE

Stateless people in "developed" countries:

Emergency care only

No insurance possible

Chronic conditions untreated

Mental health ignored

Pregnant women get minimal prenatal care

Higher infant mortality rates

In America, this means:

ER visits only

No Medicaid

No CHIP

No preventive care

Medical debt with no recourse

THE EDUCATION TRAP

Even where primary education is allowed:

No official transcripts

Can't take standardized tests

No college applications

No financial aid

No study abroad

No professional licenses

Imagine being valedictorian but unable to go to college.

THE PERPETUAL CHILDHOOD

Stateless adults remain legal children:

Can't sign contracts

Can't consent to medical treatment

Can't get married legally

Can't be legal parents to their own kids

Permanent dependence

THE MENTAL HEALTH IMPACT

Studies on stateless populations show:

78% develop depression

65% have anxiety disorders

45% have PTSD symptoms

30% attempt suicide

Children show developmental delays

Being told you don't belong anywhere breaks people.

THE CRIME VULNERABILITY

Stateless people:

Can't report crimes (fear deportation to nowhere)

Targeted by traffickers

Exploited by employers

No legal recourse

Often forced into illegal work

Then criminalized for surviving

THE GENERATIONAL CURSE

Children of stateless parents often:

Inherit statelessness

Can't be registered at birth

Grow up "illegal"

Repeat the cycle

Create permanent underclass

In 50 years: Millions of American-born non-Americans?

THE DETENTION LIMBO

When stateless people are detained:

Can't be deported (nowhere to go)

Can't be released (no status)

Indefinite detention common

Some detained for DECADES

Legal black hole

THE ECONOMIC COST

Countries with large stateless populations lose:

Tax revenue (can't work legally)

Economic productivity

Healthcare costs increase

Education investments wasted

Social instability

International reputation

THE U.S. SPECIFIC HORRORS

Under Trump's order, American-born stateless would face:

No Social Security number

No state ID

Can't get Real ID

Can't fly domestically

Can't enter federal buildings

Can't get background checks

Permanently unemployable legally

THE INTERNATIONAL LAW VIOLATION

UN Convention on Statelessness (1961):

Prohibits creating stateless children

Requires citizenship for those born in territory

US never signed but claims to follow principles

This order violates every principle

THE SIMILAR SITUATIONS

Countries that tried this:

Dominican Republic: International pariah

Myanmar: Accused of genocide

Syria: Kurds left stateless, led to instability

Nepal: Reversed after international pressure

America joining this list?

THE "PAPERS PLEASE" SOCIETY

Every American child would need to prove:

Parents' status at birth

Both parents' documentation

Hospital verification

Government database check

One missing document = not American

THE REAL STORIES COMING

If this happens, expect:

Suicides of stateless teens

Families torn apart

Brilliant kids wasted

Communities destabilized

International condemnation

Generational trauma

THE UNIQUELY AMERICAN TWIST

Unlike other countries, US stateless would:

Speak only English

Know only American culture

Have no other homeland connection

Be told they're not American

Have nowhere else to claim them

True ghosts in their birthplace.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Statelessness is:

Psychological torture

Economic death sentence

Social erasure

Generational curse

Human rights violation

Trump wants to create potentially millions of these ghost people.

In America.

Starting with babies.

This isn't policy. It's cruelty.

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Dear Heavenly Father, Thank you for today. Thank you for what you do for me each and every day and for that which I fail to notice. Thank you for taking care of my family, friends, and acquaintances. I ask that you shield and protect them and guide them in this life. Bring them safely home to you. Let them know that you are there for them. Never let me forget your presence in my life and guide…

Dear Heavenly Father, Thank you for today. Thank you for what you do for me each and every day and for that which I fail to notice. Thank you for taking care of my family, friends, and acquaintances. I ask that you shield and protect them and guide them in this life. Bring them safely home to you. Let them know that you are there for them. Never let me forget your presence in my life and guide…

Dear Heavenly Father, Thank you for today. Thank you for what you do for me each and every day and for that which I fail to notice. Thank you for taking care of my family, friends, and acquaintances. I ask that you shield and protect them and guide them in this life. Bring them safely home to you. Let them know that you are there for them. Never let me forget your presence in my life and guide…

Dear Heavenly Father, Thank you for today. Thank you for what you do for me each and every day and for that which I fail to notice. Thank you for taking care of my family, friends, and acquaintances. I ask that you shield and protect them and guide them in this life. Bring them safely home to you. Let them know that you are there for them. Never let me forget your presence in my life and guide…

Jared Keller, Pacific Standard, Nov 10, 2015

On May 25, 1948, Garry Davis became a man without a home. The 26-year-old American, a World War II veteran who had flown bombing missions across Germany, seemed an odd candidate for homelessness: The son of a popular bandleader, he’d grown up in relative luxury among the New York beau monde, studying to be an actor and mingling with high-society types prior to his draft. With the help of veteran-reintegration programs like the GI Bill, Davis seemed destined for a comfortable life upon his return home in 1944.

But Davis didn’t end up homeless, but stateless--and of his own volition. Haunted by the B-17 missions he’d flown over German cities like Brandenberg and alarmed by the endless cycle of nationalism and violence that had engulfed the world for nearly 50 years, Davis abandoned his burgeoning acting career and traveled to the United States embassy in Paris, where he renounced his American citizenship and “declared himself a citizen of the world.” Davis wasn’t defecting or committing treason; he was opting out of the Westphalian system that had come to define modern geopolitics. “I’m still me,” Davis said at the time. “The only thing that changed is that I was one passport lighter. I slept quite illegally that night.”

The subsequent decades for Davis--bouncing from home to temporary home, even staking out a United Nations restaurant in New York when the General Assembly was in session to advocate for a shift toward “world citizenship”--make a bizarre tale, one of the millions of stateless people who, lacking the right papers, float for years in a state of perpetual non-residency. Davis’ story is just one in a tapestry of interconnected anecdotes that comprise the Cosmopolites, a fascinating examination of global citizenship by Al Jazeera America editor Atossa Araxia Abrahamian. For Abrahamian, there are few more significant developments in modernity than the passport, the universal symbol of belonging and arguably the most important document on the face of the planet. The birth certificate may prove your existence, but the passport shows where exactly you belong in the world, the place you can call home. This centuries-old system, however, is under siege in the turbulent post-9/11 era--and that has serious repercussions for how we think about identity and belonging. “Citizenship in the twenty-first century is changing, changeable, interchangeable,” Abrahamian writes. “New crises explode the old mythologies of national power, and take personal allegiances with them.”

The passport is heir to a certain an old mythology in the geopolitical order. Ancient Persian king Artaxerxes sent letters to the rulers of neighboring states requesting safe passage through their lands as early as 450 B.C.E. In the Pauline epistles in the New Testament indicate that, during the rapid expansion of the Roman Empire around the historical birth of Jesus Christ, Roman citizens like Paul the Apostle could travel the known world unmolested with their own unique set of documents. It’s the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia that established the nation-state as the atomic unit of the international order and enshrined the passport as the foremost symbol of political identity. The influence of nation-state--the strange fraternity that “makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings,” in the dour words of sociologist Benedict Anderson--is at the apex of its influence not through soldiers and money, but through the ubiquity and power of its passport.

To Davis, this concept is weirdly laughable now. The technological forces of globalization, the Internet and its ancillary gadgets, have made the world so small and so deeply complex that the “imagined communities” of nation-states seem almost old-fashioned. “What has happened in terms of technology and electronics is we’ve eliminated time and distance between people,” Davis told Abrahamian during a 2012 meeting in midtown New York, where he’d set up camp in the corner of a hotel lobby. “We’re all there. We’re all there! So that’s a fact. For us to be governed by an 18th-century institution called a ‘nation’ is obviously insane.” It’s this belief that drove him to advocate the idea of world citizenship, establishing the World Passport (inspired by the “Nansen” passport for Russian refugees in 1917) and deriving legal power from the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Who needs a nation, anyway?

As a result, the passport as the foremost symbol of those insane institutions has become disentangled from its role as a sign of belonging, a badge of personal identity. Abrahamian, herself a citizen of Canada, Switzerland, and Iran who grew up among the children of jet-setting world citizens in Geneva, brilliantly reveals the complicated story of modern citizenship through the lens of the growing “passport bubble,” the market for citizenship that puts national identity on the counter for those with the resources and the connections. Business is very good: Investor-citizens spent $2 billion buying passports in 2014, according to Bloomberg Markets, and nations from cash-strapped islands like Malta and St. Kitts to, yes, even the U.S., increasingly offer lucrative opportunities for you to establish residency and expedite your swift transformation from visitor to citizen.

Abrahamian’s meticulous and intricate examination excels, and not just in its focus on the capitalist middlemen--for example, Swiss Christian Kalin of “global leader in residence and citizenship planning” firm Henley & Partners--who are driving the new citizenship market. Instead, her story, like most modern tales of the global economy in the age of income inequality, vacillates between the haves and the have-nots, the “one percent” and everyone else. On one side are those who share her unusual national allegiances: mainly, the millionaires and billionaires seeking their next passport and the strange group of international middlemen, like Kalin, cropping up to sell them citizenship to countries like St. Kitts and Antigua. These island nations have become especially strapped for cash after the 2008 global financial crisis: St. Kitts, with Kalin’s help, will furnish “citizen-investors” with a home away from home for between $200,000 and $400,000. That’s a huge boon for the tiny Caribbean nation. “Passport money,” Abrahamian explains, exploded from one percent to 25 percent of the country’s GDP between 2006 and 2014, making passports the nation’s number-one export.

Outside of pure business opportunities, those new global elites have long been trending away from national allegiances for years. The rise of the new global plutocracy has yielded “a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home,” wrote Canadian MP and former Reuters editor Chrystia Freeland in 2001. “Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.” Entrepreneurs like those at Henley aren’t undermining national identity, but are simply ahead of the curve: They’ve identified “a cultural sea change in the way countries and citizens conceive of the social contract, arguing that traditional ways of allocating citizenship to individuals--by birth or through blood--are fundamentally arbitrary,” Abrahamian writes. “After all, you don’t choose where you’re born or who your parents are. Since we live in a globalized world, he said, birthplace and blood no longer hold the same significance as they used to.”

The passport hijinks of the super-rich are deeply fascinating but also deeply depressing. Consider those on the other end of the spectrum from multi-visa’d über-citizens--the stateless, the refugees, nomads, and outcasts, people with nowhere they can legally call home. “Citizen of the world” Garry Davis is one, but Abrahamian is more interested (with good reason) in examining the peculiar case of Ahmad Abdul Khaleq, a bidoon blogger born in the United Arab Emirates. The bidoon are an often-nomadic ethnic minority of stateless people in the Middle East living without official documentation and considered illegal immigrants by the U.A.E. and Kuwaiti officials, and Khaleq recently found himself in prison for railing against the government treatment of his kin. Where plutocrats take on a kind of transcendent statelessness with multiple passports, Khaleq and other bidoon are tragically stateless, legally considered strangers in their own home.

Where Davis found himself without a home in 1948, Khaleq eventually found himself a member of one he’d never visited: the Comoro Islands, the small archipelago of some 800,000 in the Indian Ocean. The U.A.E. and Kuwait, like many of Gulf neighbors already attempting to reconcile ethnic and cultural divisions with the artificial borders carved out by the West during the 20th century, really had no idea what to do with the historically tribal and nomadic paupers roaming through the region. The U.A.E. came up with a novel solution: Rather than offering the bidoon Emirati citizenship--which comes with its own political baggage--government officials shelled out cash to make Khaleq and his family “reluctant cosmopolites,” as Abrahamian writes.

Like Davis, the Comoran gambit is a bizarre case--and a cruel twist of the knife for Khaleq, who couldn’t be deported as a bidoon but was getting thrown out of the country as a Comoran. (He “had gotten his wish--he was no longer stateless,” Abrahamian writes. “He now had a passport. But it felt more like a curse rather than a blessing.”) The U.A.E.’s bidoon problem aside, the legal gymnastics further undermine the sociopolitical essentialism of the passport. For the U.A.E. and Kuwait, the latter of which dispatched Syrian-French businessman and citizenship middleman Bashar Kiwan to facilitate the deal with the Comoran government, this was little more than a solution to an internal political problem. For the Comorans, one of the world’s poorest countries, it’s an easy transaction to bring in much-needed revenue. For Khaleq, however, this was a nightmare. “We are bidoon,” he told Abrahamian, “we have rights, we are born here, our father was born here, and our grandfather was born here.... All I know about the Comoros was from books about the Arab explorers. I never expected that one day I would be a citizen of this country.”

Kalin and Khaleq’s experiences with the citizenship market are both rare, but the lessons Abrahamian uses them to illustrate in the Cosmopolities--that, somehow, statelessness now has a market solution--is oddly relevant today. Consider the rising tide of refugees spilling out of war-torn Syria, the three million who’ve fled into the country’s Middle Eastern neighbors and the 150,000 who have sought asylum in the European Union. The journey is physically fraught, certainly, but it’s also a challenge for citizenship: The Dublin Regulation, which requires asylum seekers to be “registered, and fingerprinted, in the first E.U. state they entered,” captures the inherent flexibility of citizenship. Unlike Khaleq, the stateless Syrian refugee Ghaith, whose exodus Schmidle traces over 10 borders, is more than delighted to call somewhere else home. “Once his wife arrived, they would have children and he would raise them as Swedes,” writes Schmidle of Ghaith’s newfound residency in the Nordic playground. “He didn’t care if his kids spoke Arabic. He added, in broken English, ‘I worship Sweden.’”