Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 53 (2021) Ghosts in America: Working Towards Building a Legal Framework for Stateless Individuals in the United States of movement. 23 They may also face other barriers including travel restrictions and social exclusion. 24 As a result, they experience increased vulnerability to sexual and physical violence, human trafficking, exploitation, and forcible displacement. 25 The tragedy of statelessness is that it is a man-made problem.26 And so far, neither the international community nor the national authorities have adequately addressed it. On an international scale, a collective action problem hinders global cooperation towards reducing the number of stateless individuals as individual countries hesitate to confer their nationality onto stateless individuals, hoping that another country will instead. 27 On a domestic scale, the current immigration framework used by United States immigration authorities is deaf to the specific political and economic needs of stateless individuals.28 Unfortunately, the problem of statelessness is intractable without an international agreement on state responsibility for stateless individuals. 29 In Part One, I explain the causes of stateless persons. First, I summarize the political determinants of statelessness; including, state succession, arbitrary discrimination, and technical causes. Then, I will put a human face on statelessness by talking about the consequences of statelessness. In Part Two, I describe the international legal framework that has proven to be ineffective at providing an international solution. International cooperation to improve the status of stateless individuals and reduce or eliminate statelessness has enjoyed limited success for several reasons. 30 First, the biggest obstacle to an international solution is a collective action problem resulting from the tension between 23. Id. 24. Anna Roberts, No Place to Run: The Forgotten Vulnerabilities of the Stateless, O’NEILL INST. (Oct. 3, 2016), https://oneill.law.georgetown.edu/noplace-to-run-the-forgotten-vulnerabilities-of-the-stateless/. 25. Id. 26. U.N. High Comm’r for Refugees (UNHCR), Ending Statelessness Within 10 Years, at 2 (Nov. 2010) [hereinafter Ending Statelessness Within 10 Years]. 27. See id. at 5–6. 28. Corgan, supra note 18, at 6. 29. Benjamin Boudreaux, Statelessness, Sovereignty, and International Law: Promoting the “Right to Have Rights,” in HUMAN DIGNITY AND THE FUTURE OF GLOBAL INSTITUTIONS 207, 211 (Mark P. Lagon & Anthony Clark Arend eds., 2014). 30. Michelle Foster & Hélène Lambert, Statelessness as a Human Rights Issue: A Concept Whose Time Has Come, 28 INT’L J. REFUGEE L. 564, 565. 361