2020 Statelessness & Citizenship Review I 2(2) INTRODUCTION An earthquake cannot swallow a nation, but another nation will. — Official Motto of the Burmese Ministry of Labour, Immigration and Population (‘MoLIP’). 1 The grave problem facing the country given the great number of Haitians who have passively invaded our territory on a massive scale, and, what is worse they are procreating children with Dominican women, who by virtue of having been born here are Dominican. — Memorandum from Manuel De Jesus Estrada Medina, Director General of Migration to President Joaquin Balague, 6 May 1969. 2 The silent and invidious demographic invasion of Assam may result in the loss of the geostrategically vital districts of lower Assam. — Supreme Court of India, Sarbananda Sonowal v Union of India. 3 Discriminatory policies have the capacity to create statelessness on a massive scale. Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of stateless persons around the world belong to impoverished minority communities whose members are not considered legitimate citizens of the countries they inhabit. 4 The intentionality of such discrimination is guided inter alia by xenophobia, racism and its nationalist expression: nativism, understood here as the belief that an internal minority with real or alleged foreign connections is a threat to the nation. Exclusionary narratives, according to this line of thought, present the target communities as an enemy invader. Hence, this article analyses how nativism is reflected in the production of laws and policies that have led to large groups of stateless persons. It does so by comparing three relevant cases: Rakhine State and wider Myanmar, the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean and the State of Assam in India. In all three situations, discriminatory policies have led to the disenfranchisement of large groups of its minority population (the Rohingya and others in Myanmar, ethnic 1 2 3 4 ‘Myanmar Info’ Ministry of Labour, Immigration, and Population <http://www.modins.net/myanmarinfo/ministry/population.htm> (‘MoLIP Web Page’). Memorandum from Manuel De Jesus Estrada Medina, Director General of Migration to President Joaquin Balague, 6 May 1969 in Allison Petrozziello, Género y el Riesgo de Apatridia para la Población de Ascendencia Haitiana en los Bateyes de la República Dominicana (Centro para la Observación Migratoria y el Desarrollo en el Caribe 2017) annex 1. [2005] 5 SCC 665, 24 (‘Sonowal’). This article develops the research undertaken by the authors for the Chapter ‘Statelessness Motivated by Nativism, Racism and Xenophobia: A Comparison of Myanmar, the Dominican Republic and India’ in The World’s Stateless: Deprivation of Nationality (Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion 2020) 163. 196