Displaced in Place

      Something much more fundamental than freedom and justice … is at stake when belonging to the community into which one is born is no longer a matter of course and not belonging no longer a matter of choice.

      —Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

      The sun is shining warmly as the ocean breeze gently moves among the pine trees. We have been sitting here a while, our only company a lone crab scavenging for food at the water’s edge. “She had just graduated out of high school,” says Luzena Dumercy, looking out to sea. “She graduated that Friday and that Sunday she left on the boat.”¹ The young woman to whom Dumercy refers never came back. She was one of at least eleven people who drowned in Bahamian waters on June 11, 2012, attempting to make it somewhere else.² “You have to understand why we get to that point to begin with,” continues Dumercy. “They don’t want us here. They don’t make us feel like we belong.… Why would you stay somewhere you’re not wanted?”

      Although we are discussing why some people of Haitian descent undertake the perilous sea voyage to leave their Bahamian home, Dumercy’s story is a local echo of a global phenomenon—the widespread movement of people from one place to another in the contemporary era. According to the United Nations (UN), over two hundred million people are on the move globally (UN DESA 2016, 1 and 5). Of these, more than nineteen million are refugees (1 and 9). Whether people are fleeing conflict or persecution, seeking better economic opportunities, or attempting to reunite with family members, the recent images of bodies washing up on Mediterranean shores, of people scaling seemingly impenetrable fences in places like Ceuta and Melilla, and of individuals running across weakly managed borders, add flesh, if not individual stories, to these statistics. What distinguishes the people in Dumercy’s account from many other migrants, however, is that they are driven to leave their home not because of conflict, crisis, or persecution, or because they are trying to escape from an autocratic, failing, or failed state. Instead, they are trying, in Dumercy’s words, “to flee” because they feel as if they do not belong. “They want to leave this place because it’s toxic sometimes,” Dumercy explains. “You shouldn’t be stateless in the place [where] you were born and where you feel like you’re not included or not wanted.”

      This book examines the situation of those who are excluded from formal belonging by practices of citizenship deprivation and denial in the countries of their birth. Unlike the majority of forced migrants and other people on the move, these individuals are not recognized as nationals³ by any state under the operation of its law (UN 1954). They are stateless. Statelessness affects more than ten million people worldwide (UNHCR 2015e).⁴ Without any formal bond of citizenship, stateless people are susceptible to an array of human rights violations, social exclusion, and pervasive insecurity, among other concerns.

      While their plight can be just as troubling as that suffered by refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and other forced migrants, stateless people are rarely forced to flee their homes, whether within a state as IDPs or across state borders as refugees.⁵ They are consequently not considered forcibly displaced persons. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the body mandated with the protection of refugees and stateless people globally, for instance, remarks that a “staggering crisis” faces the world as nearly sixty million people are forcibly displaced (Murray 2015, n. pag.); but it does not include the stateless within this figure because “being stateless doesn’t necessarily correlate to being displaced” (UNHCR 2014f). In this book, I challenge this position.

      Whereas Hannah Arendt, one of the twentieth century’s great political theorists, lamented that the stateless were referred to as “‘displaced persons’ … for the express purpose of liquidating statelessness once and for all by ignoring its existence” (Arendt [1948] 2004, 355), I contend that we must reconceptualize statelessness as a form of forced displacement precisely to understand and address this extreme form of noncitizenship. By reconceptualizing statelessness as a form of forced displacement in situ—that is, one does not have to be physically pushed across borders or made to flee one’s home within a state due to conflict, crisis, or persecution to be forcibly displaced—I demonstrate how states can engage in practices that forcibly displace the unwanted among them, often through seemingly neutral membership policies and laws or ostensibly banal bureaucratic procedures.

      Using a comparative case study of The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic (DR), I show how the stateless are either forced into liminality—a realm of formal nonbelonging everywhere—or made to take on the nationality of a country with which they do not identify (Haiti) when the state of their birth can no longer tolerate their ambiguous status. In both instances, I illustrate how the stateless are simultaneously rooted and displaced. They are rooted in that they are born and continue to reside within the country of their birth (although the latter excludes them); yet they are displaced in that they face similar constraints on their ability to be self-determining agents and to enjoy human rights, freedoms, and protections akin to other forced migrants. In fact, their lack of movement is one of the primary differences between them and the “rightless” of whom Hannah Arendt wrote last century.⁶

       Citizenship, the State, and Human Rights

      Writing in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Arendt described how millions of people were essentially rendered