You can’t go back to a country that doesn’t exist

Opinion>Opinions - Immigration The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill You can’t go back to a country that doesn’t exist Comments: by Karina Ambartsoumian-Clough, opinion contributor - 07/30/26 8:30 AM ET Comments: Link copied by Karina Ambartsoumian-Clough, opinion contributor - 07/30/26 8:30 AM ET Comments: Link copied

Illustration / Courtney Jones; and Adobe Stock

“Go back to your country” is the most common trope I hear people throw around when they want to belittle immigrants in this country. The reality is that some of us don’t have a country to go back to.

Immigration law in the U.S. was written on the assumption that everyone belongs somewhere. Stateless people like me expose a gap in that law that Congress has never closed.

My family sought asylum in the U.S. when I was eight years old. By the time our claim was denied, and we were ordered to leave, the Soviet Union had dissolved, and the country listed on my birth certificate no longer existed. Ukraine did not recognize me as a citizen. There was nowhere for us to return to. We became part of the roughly 218,000 people living in the U.S. who are stateless.

Stateless people in this country live in precarious situations with little to no legal remedy. Because we lack a passport, we have no real form of identification — and that makes navigating ordinary life nearly impossible.

Many of us cannot get a driver’s license or a state ID, which means we can’t legally drive, open a bank account, sign a lease or board a domestic flight without running into obstacles. Without a Social Security number, most jobs are off the table, even if we have the degree or the skills to do them. Professional licenses — the kind teachers, nurses and contractors need — are frequently out of reach.

We cannot travel outside the country, because leaving might mean we are never allowed back in. And a routine encounter with police, one that would be a non-event for most people, can turn into a prolonged detention simply because we can’t produce the paperwork officers expect everyone to have.

Yet so many stateless people have only known this country. We have grown up here, attended school here, found ways to fund our own college education and earn degrees, purchased homes, married and started families. Even if we are not seen as citizens on paper, this country is our home.

And we are not invisible to the government. Most stateless people have filed for asylum — or some other form of temporary status like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or Temporary Protected Status — and some have received work authorization.

There are stateless people who have been here for decades, checking in yearly with immigration officers the entire time. In the worst cases, stateless people have sat in immigration detention for years, sometimes decades, because there is no country willing to accept them. Nobody should be subjected to that kind of cruelty, especially now, as the American public is seeing firsthand the conditions inside our nation’s detention centers.

Statelessness has often been ignored as an issue, but it briefly broke through during the birthright citizenship Supreme Court case, when families feared their newborns would become stateless if the executive order had been allowed to move forward. Thankfully for those families, the Supreme Court once again upheld the 14th Amendment, which protects children from growing up without the security of citizenship.

Now Congress can go further by passing the Stateless Protection Act, which would finally offer a durable solution for people who have already been living in this country for years, sometimes decades, without a nationality. The bill would create a formal process for stateless people to have their status recognized by the U.S. government — something that doesn’t exist today.

Once recognized, a stateless person would be protected from detention and deportation, granted a form of legal identification and a travel document and authorized to work. It would not hand anyone automatic citizenship — it would simply do what should have been done long ago: let people who belong to no country, but who have built their entire lives in this one, finally get identification, hold jobs legally and stop living in fear of a knock on the door.

The U.S. has never even signed the two United Nations treaties that govern how countries are supposed to treat stateless people — the 1954 Convention, which 99 countries have joined, and the 1961 Convention, which 82 have joined. Our immigration laws reflect that same outdated blind spot: Statelessness simply isn’t accounted for.

Passing the Stateless Protection Act would close one of the most glaring gaps in our immigration system and let stateless people finally have a sense of belonging somewhere.

Karina Ambartsoumian-Clough is co-founder and executive director of United Stateless.