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 international law and individual State sovereignty. 31 Many countries would identify statelessness as a problem, but no country alone is ready to be a part of the solution or take on burdens unless other countries do as well. 32 Although there is a basic international humanitarian concern for other humans, 33 States retain (and want to retain) the right to determine nationality as part of State sovereignty. 34 In other words, while individual States have an interest in diminishing the problem of statelessness, they would rather not be the ones to grant a particular stateless group citizenship. 35 Instead, they would rather avoid the political costs of welcoming stateless individuals and would prefer to have other States take on the responsibility of nationalizing new groups of individuals. 36 As a result, while international legal frameworks currently exist to prevent statelessness, their weaknesses and historically low rate of commitment to implementation and enforcement have made them largely ineffective in solving the plight of stateless individuals. 37 The international community has also considered protections for refugees and the statelessness separately despite their similarities with the prioritized focus on refugees. 38 As a result, the development of protections for stateless individuals has lagged behind protections for refugee populations. 39 Additionally, stateless individuals who should have qualified for refugee protections have been denied those protections because the two categories are being considered separately. 40 In practice, however, there is substantial intersectionality between being stateless and being a refugee. 41 And fourth, statelessness 31. See Boudreaux, supra note 29, at 209–11. 32. Id. at 211. 33. Id. at 209. 34. Id. (“The principle asserting that states determine their own citizens has been enshrined and advanced by international law, from at least the 1930 Hague Convention on Nationality onward and has been further developed and applied in judicial cases, such as the Nottebohm case adjudicated in 1955 by the International Court of Justice, which claims that ‘nationality is within the domestic jurisdiction of the State.’“). 35. Id. at 211. 36. Id. 37. Laura van Waas, Statelessness: A 21st century challenge for Europe, 20 SEC. & HUM. RTS. 133, 140 (2009); Foster & Lambert, supra note 30, at 567. 38. Guy Goodwin-Gill, Statelessness is Back (Not That it Ever Went Away…), EJIL: TALK! (Sept. 12, 2019), https://www.ejiltalk.org/statelessness-isback-not-that-it-ever-went-away/ [https://perma.cc/57S5-2SCV]. 39. Id. 40. Id. 41. Id. 362