United Stateless

The Elevate Prize would be used to fund the work of United Stateless. Founded in 2018, we are a national organization with a mission to build community among those affected by statelessness and to advocate for our human right to a nationality. Over the past three years we have laid the foundation for our work and have learned that we cannot develop and sustain our core operations, advocacy, stateless services and research without funding. 

To build capacity and increase our outreach,  we must transition from an all-volunteer organization to a staffed organization. We aim to raise funds to :(1) support the salary and fringe benefits of my role as Executive Director; (2) hire part-time advocacy coordinator to advance our advocacy agenda; (3) hire a part-time communications consultant to manage organizational outreach and publications; and (4) hire a part-time coordinator to support building our intake and legal referral program. In addition, we aim to fund research projects to better understand and address issues faced by stateless individuals, provide stipends and honorariums to members who engage in speaking events, and establish a Stateless Relief Fund to assist stateless members in housing, detention release, health support and etc.

In 1988, I was born in a country that no longer exists and the country that replaced it does not recognize me as their citizen. At age eight I arrived in the U.S. seeking asylum and after my asylum claim was denied for the third time, I was placed on final removal order to self deport at age 13 . I am now 33 years old,  a stateless person on final removal order to self deport, a DACA recipient and even though I am married to a U.S. citizen, I am unable to adjust status. In the past, I assumed high level organizations were actively advocating on behalf of stateless people in the U.S. and that legislation would pass within my lifetime. Needless to say, I was very wrong. 

As a founding member of United Stateless, it is a privilege and honor to have been nominated to lead as the Executive Director. With our core values in mind (Stateless-led, Family, Bold Inclusion, and Joyful Resilience), my vision for my role is to secure the funding needed to fully staff the organization with the ultimate goal to transition the role to the next leader of the organization.

The U.S. is home to over 200,000 stateless people who are “not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law." Often referred to as ‘citizens of nowhere,’ as no country claims us as their own. There is currently no legal framework for statelessness in the U.S and it is a largely unknown, misunderstood and an underreported issue. Consequently, we face restrictions on our basic human rights and are vulnerable to discrimination with no path to U.S. citizenship but no way to leave the U.S. legally and live elsewhere.

United Stateless started as a simple conversation between several stateless strangers in the U.S. who soon discovered the universality of our stories and collectively made the decision to use our stories to advocate for the change in laws and policy we desperately need. We fundamentally believe that everyone deserves a human right to nationality. We focus on community building by identifying stateless people, bringing them into our circle, and learning from their experiences so we can all advocate for change in a way that is representative of the diversity of stateless people in the U.S.

What makes United Stateless innovative is our unique role within several different movements. We identify with human rights movements, especially for the protection of nationality rights. We represent the stateless community, one that remains the most vulnerable and invisible. Our voices add critical steam to the work of those combating citizenship stripping and human trafficking.

In the U.S., we intersect with refugee and immigrant rights movements. However, few colleagues in those movements are familiar with the problem of statelessness. We work diligently to show up in these spaces, educate our future allies and partners, and broaden the conversation. 

Over the past year and a half, we have formed project teams of stateless members and allies who together plan and implement our core projects. One of our core values is that the stateless members should always be in the lead, shaping the vision and making decisions about the organization’s priorities. We respect the emotional boundaries of the stateless members, as much of our work draws from their first-hand—and at times, tragic—experiences. Our resources and labor are not limitless; it inspires us to be more generous and kind in our work.

We envision a world where nobody is deprived of nationality based on their race, ethnicity, sex, gender, or religion - a world where everyone’s human right to nationality is protected and upheld as stated in Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We give a voice to those who have been made invisible by the complete lack of recognition combined with the real fear of raising our hand to say, yes, we exist. By coming together as a community, that fear of speaking up is diminished. When we can tell our stories of how we have been denied a nationality, we begin to bring these forms of structural oppression out into the open. To end statelessness, we have to name the forms of oppression that create it. Statelessness has not only happened in the past but it is happening in real time around the world and here, in the U.S.  We believe that we can build the political will in the U.S. to pass our proposed legislation and implement policies to protect and prevent statelessness. We aim to hold the government accountable to its commitments to end statelessness abroad by saying ‘start at home’.