32 Allerton ‘legal’, in the sense of being allowed to remain in Sabah. However, they still lack a nationality. Whether or not the government of the Philippines would recognise them as citizens, and notwithstanding the inability of Aisyah and her brothers to attend Malaysian government school, the important point in their case is that they do not want to be Filipino citizens, since they feel they belong in Malaysia. Thus, when the Filipino learning centre, where Aisyah studied, organised document-processing by the Philippines National Statistics Office, neither Aisyah nor her brothers were interested in applying for such documents. This implies that for some people, the impulse to escape statelessness is by no means as strong as the impulse to ‘hold out’ for a particular, preferred nationality that might be gained in the future. Studying statelessness on the ground in Sabah is complicated, not only by such cases of long-term residence by people lacking either an effective nationality, or by their possible preference for temporary stateless over Filipino nationality, in order that they might eventually gain the Malaysian nationality they feel they deserve. It is also complicated by the reality that many refugees from the Philippines originally came to Sabah to escape fighting, in which they were as likely to have been killed by their national army as by Muslim separatists. It is ironic that many Suluk people, who express ambivalence towards what they see as the ‘colonial’ Philippines state in Muslim-majority areas of that country, are simply treated as ‘Filipinos’ by Malaysians in Sabah. Some of the children of such ‘Filipinos’ had heard stories of violence and warfare from their parents and grandparents, and repeated to me the opinion that, whatever difficulties were experienced in Malaysia, it was at least safer than the place from which their family originated. Recent reports of fighting in and around Zamboanga city, in the south of the island of Mindanao,16 illustrate the reality of such safety concerns for those who lack desire to ‘return’ to the Philippines. Moreover, ongoing violence in the southern Philippines, from which many people continue to flee, complicates any easy separation of earlier ‘refugees’ from contemporary ‘economic migrants’. On the ground, statelessness as a distinctive issue often disappears from view, since it is almost completely entangled with wider issues of ‘illegality’. Even if one were clearly able to separate ‘stateless children’ from ‘undocumented children’, their practical experience is in fact very similar. This is why, despite their differing ethnicities and family histories, and despite the different degrees of assistance offered by their apparent ‘home’ countries, the children of Indonesians and Filipinos actually share many common experiences. 16 BBC, ‘Rebels and troops resume fight in southern Philippines’ BBC (14 September 2013) <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-24089553> accessed 14 September 2013. tilburg law review 19 (2014) 26-34