Journal of Human Rights 191 some states are inventing ad hoc documentation for children born to nonresident mothers, as can be seen in Namibia and Israel. In Namibia, concerns about Angolan women crossing the border to give birth to putative citizen children led to the creation of an extra-legal “foreigner” birth certificate. According to Dianne Hubbard, who coordinates the Gender Research & Advocacy Project at the Legal Assistance Center in Windhoek, The most common reason given by Ministry [of Home Affairs] staff for denying a birth certificate to both children and adults is concern that the person seeking registration is not a Namibian citizen. There are, for instance, fears that Angolan children (whose mothers may have crossed the border to give birth in Namibian health facilities) may be registered as Namibian citizens, or that Namibian women may be paid to register a foreign child as their own so that the child can be identified as a Namibian citizen and claim social benefits reserved for Namibian citizens. There are also fears that false claims to Namibian citizenship might influence election outcomes (2021, p. 27). Such concerns have led Namibian civil registrars to create an extra-legal foreigner birth certificate for those they determine not to be “ordinarily resident,” even though they apparently have no legal authority to do so. Such ad hoc documentation practices are often dead ends for the families involved, leaving children at risk of statelessness. In Israel, hospitals began issuing hand-written birth notifications in Hebrew without the father’s name in lieu of a birth certificate for children of migrants. This came as a migration control response to the increasing presence of children born to African asylum seekers, who began arriving en masse—mostly from Sudan and Eritrea, via the Sinai desert—between 2007 and 2012 (Harpaz & Herzog, 2018). Birth registration practices intersect with Israeli migration enforcement in several ways. Israel’s restrictions on issuance of birth certificates for children of foreigners born on its territory can be read as part of state efforts to securitize migration management, limit access to asylum, and make people deportable.10 In 2013 the CRC expressed the following concerns: Children of migrants born in the State party often do not receive an official birth certificate but a hand-written official notification without the father’s name being indicated. The Committee is also concerned about information that migrant families who are unable to cover the cost of hospitalization might be denied birth notification, and about reported cases of migrant families who have to pay exorbitant costs for a DNA test in order to have the father’s name included in the birth notification. The Committee is further concerned about reported cases of families forced to sign voluntary return declarations to be able to obtain official birth certificates (2013, para. 29b; emphasis added). For its part, the Israeli government has claimed in court documents that it does not have a legal obligation to issue official birth certificates to foreigners, and that it would no longer be doing so as a way of preventing them from claiming the right to stay (Sherwood, 2013). This compounded an existing discriminatory practice of the Israeli Population and Immigration Authority of refusing to include the father’s name on foreigners’ birth certificates. Government authorities are also reportedly forcing migrant parents to sign “voluntary” return declarations to obtain official birth certificates. The CRC has made it clear that birth certificates should include the names of both parents, as is done for Israeli children, and that the “issuance of birth certificates should in no way be made conditional on the signing of ‘voluntary’ return declarations” (2013, para. 30). Without a birth certificate, parents cannot obtain identity documents or confirmation of citizenship from their consulates, either. They will remain stateless—but that does not mean they can or will leave. They may remain indefinitely in Israel, joining the generations of “sabra ghost” children born to women migrant workers.11 Conclusion This article has argued for the usefulness of intersectionality as a human rights research methodology by demonstrating how it was used in a global study on birth registration and