tilburg law review 19 (2014) 26-34 brill.com/tilr Statelessness and the Lives of the Children of Migrants in Sabah, East Malaysia Catherine Allerton Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics c.l.allerton@lse.ac.uk Abstract This article explores issues involved with researching statelessness ‘on the ground’ during ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia with the children of migrants and refugees. It argues that many of these children, whose parents or grandparents originate from Indonesia or the Philippines, lack an ‘effective nationality’. However, rather than statelessness or illegality per se, what dominates these children’s lives is their perpetual ‘foreignness’. Even when children might be able to have their citizenship recognised by a parental country of origin, families often prefer to remain undocumented, and to wait (perhaps indefinitely) for the Malaysian citizenship they perceive as rightfully theirs. Keywords statelessness – migration – citizenship – children – Malaysia – Sabah ... The primary injustice the stateless experience (…) is not that they cannot find a state to grant them citizenship but that the state which should grant them citizenship will, for various reasons, not do so.1 * This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/ J012262/1]. 1 Matthew J Gibney, ‘Statelessness and the Right to Citizenship’ (2009) 32 Forced Migration Review 50, 50. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/22112596-01902004