34 Allerton ‘foreigners’ – could not attend government schools, their answers were revealing. The most common answers were ‘because foreign children don’t have birth certificates’ and ‘because foreign children don’t have proper documents.’ For these children, it is their lack of documents that prevents them from receiving Malaysian education. However, the reality is that even children with ‘proper’ documents are unable to attend government schools if those documents state that they are ‘non-citizens’. Unlike other contexts, it is not statelessness or illegality per se that prevent children from accessing education (or health care) in Malaysia. Rather, it is their perpetual ‘foreignness’, their exclusion from Malaysian citizenship. In this paper I have given a very preliminary account of the difficulties of determining the ‘statelessness’ of the children of migrants in Sabah, and the entanglement of this issue with other issues on the ground. However, I have also tried to show how, in this context, people do not necessarily desire the nationality that might be most easily available to them. One young woman I knew well had a Filipino father and an Indonesian mother, parents who – like many such couples – had met as migrant labourers in Sabah. She once confessed that she had never tried to gain either Filipino or Indonesian identity documents. Rather, for as long as she is unable to gain a Malaysian identity card, (and whatever her legal position might in fact be) she considers herself to be ‘stateless’. She may be very unusual amongst those I knew in explicitly referring to statelessness rather than ‘documents’, but her sense that her ‘rightful’ identity is Malaysian, is common. Her and the other children and young people I knew do not consider themselves ‘nowhere people’. This is why, in considering statelessness, we must not neglect broader issues of justice and human rights, or the fact that children of migrants may not simply desire ‘documents’, but recognition of their right to be considered ‘people from here’. tilburg law review 19 (2014) 26-34