2015] LIFE AFTER LIMBO 355 for stateless persons, and it should harmonize that system with the guidance provided by the international protection framework. I. INTERNATIONAL PROTECTION AND THE UNITED STATES International protection, particularly as it relates to stateless persons and refugees, has been a feature of the global community’s efforts to provide humanitarian relief for nearly a century.6 The international community developed specific legal regimes to resettle refugees and stateless persons in the wake of the Second World War, and as the dimensions of these problems have evolved, so have the protection regimes themselves. Throughout this process of evolution, the statelessness protection framework has been the quiet sibling of the refugee protection regime. However, statelessness protection has more recently commanded international attention, after hundreds of thousands of people were left stateless during the succession and reformation of states in the post-Cold War era.7 It is primarily the plight of persons left stateless by these large scale political shifts, and the accompanying legal reforms, that has brought this issue to the attention of U.S. officials in a more focused way. Philosopher Hannah Arendt described the “calamity of the rightless” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, her 1951 account of the process of dehumanization that came to a crescendo in the atrocities of WWII.8 Of the stateless, Arendt said: “Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed, but that nobody wants to oppress them. Only in the last stage of a rather lengthy process is their right to live threatened.”9 Arendt suggested that the Nazi denationalization of the Jewish people that resulted in their statelessness was a decisive step in the effort to eliminate them from existence.10 At the same time that Arendt wrote of the intense vulnerabilities of stateless persons, the United Nations (U.N.) convened a Conference of Plenipotentiaries to complete the drafting and signature of a convention for 6. Soon after the establishment of the League of Nations in 1920, Fridtjof Nansen was named as the High Commissioner for Refugees. See UNHCR, THE STATE OF THE WORLD’S REFUGEES 2000: FIFTY YEARS OF HUMANITARIAN ACTION 15 (2000), available at http://www.unhcr.org/4a4c754a9. html; 2006 Y.B. Int’l L. Comm’n, U.N. Doc. A/61/10 (discussing deliberation about conflicts between nationalities at the 1930 Hague Conference). 7. INSTITUTE ON STATELESSNESS AND INCLUSION, THE WORLD’S STATELESS 96 (2014), available at http://www.institutesi.org/worldsstateless.pdf (reporting that “Some 85% of stateless persons reported in Europe can be found in just four countries (Latvia, the Russian Federation, Estonia and Ukraine)—in all cases as an enduring product of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.”). 8. HANNAH ARENDT, THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM 295-96 (1951). 9. Id. 10. Id. (“Even the Nazis started their extermination of the Jews by first depriving them of all legal status (the status of second-class citizenship) and cutting them off from the world of the living by herding them into ghettos and concentration camps, and before they set the gas chambers in motion they had carefully tested and found to their satisfaction that no country would claim these people. The point is that a condition of complete rightlessness was created before the right to live was challenged.”). Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2796321