Statelessness and the Lives of the Children of Migrants ∵ 1 27 Introduction In printed and web-based material, stateless children are commonly symbolised by the image of a young, wide-eyed child, looking forlornly into the distance. Such images are often, though not always, accompanied by text suggesting that stateless children are ‘lost,’ ‘lacking an identity’ or ‘a place in the world’. An example of this kind of approach would be many of the photographs of Greg Constantine, a photojournalist who has done much to highlight the issue of statelessness in Asia. Constantine’s photographs of ‘The Lost Children of Sabah’ – one of several cases in his ‘Nowhere People’ project – focus predominantly on children working in a fish market and usually portray an image of forlorn hopelessness.2 Such images are in strong contrast to my own experiences acquired through researching the lives of children at risk of statelessness in Sabah, East Malaysia. These are moving images of children performing choreographed dances to music emerging from mobile phones, or jumping high over elastic in the yard of a learning centre. From August 2012 to August 2013, I carried out ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Kota Kinabalu with the children of Indonesian and Filipino migrants. Ethnography, the primary methodological tool of anthropologists, aims at uncovering, through the sharing of daily experiences, people’s taken-for-granted and everyday understandings. Thus, in addition to researching the conditions in which these children lived, and the problems that they faced, I wanted to uncover children’s own perspectives on their past, present and future. Though I knew children who lived in difficult circumstances, who had faced past adversity or a highly uncertain future, it would be hard to describe any of these children as ‘lost’ or as ‘nowhere people’. Indeed, one of my strongest memories from fieldwork is of an eleven year-old boy who, in response to my question about his ethnic origins, looked fiercely at me and exclaimed, ‘I am a person from here!’ This paper, written just a few weeks after ending fieldwork and leaving Malaysia, represents an early reflection on some of the issues encountered in researching statelessness ‘on the ground’. It aims not only to explore the difference between ‘legal’ and ‘effective’ statelessness, but also to highlight people’s 2 See Greg Constantine, ‘Nowhere people project. ‘<http://www.nowherepeople.org/index .php#s=0&mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&p=4&a=0&at=0> accessed 20 October 2013. tilburg law review 19 (2014) 26-34