Statelessness and the Lives of the Children of Migrants 33 Children who lack legal documents fear being picked up by the police during one of the regular operations – on buses, in shopping centres or in squatter settlements – aimed at ‘checking’ documents. This is particularly the case for children aged over 12, the age at which young Malaysian citizens are supposed to acquire an identity card. Whatever the complexity of legally establishing an individual as ‘stateless’, in Sabah (as has been argued for other contexts17) legal statelessness must be analysed alongside the kind of ‘effective statelessness’ created by irregular migration. Indeed, given that holders of IMM13 passes are potentially stateless but nevertheless legally documented, it remains to be explored whether, in this specific context, there might be some advantages to being ‘stateless’ over being ‘undocumented’. 4 Can there be an Ethnography of Statelessness? The entanglement of statelessness with wider issues of illegality in Sabah makes its ethnographic exploration somewhat tricky. During my fieldwork with the children of migrants, I was able to observe and explore children’s experiences of and perspectives on many issues, including friendship, documents, the police, schooling, work, families and dancing. I observed the limitations that illegality placed on children’s lives, and their occasionally defiant responses. I laughed as children, so different to those conventional images of forlorn statelessness, made constant jokes about ethnicity, about police checkpoints and about corruption. I also saw a frustration amongst some teenagers as they became aware that, in their perpetual status as ‘foreigners’, they are also doomed to do the jobs (cleaning, construction, factory-work) that ‘foreigners’ do. However, ‘statelessness’ as such was not something that I could explore ethnographically, given both the uncertainties surrounding people’s legal status, and young people’s own lack of awareness of this legal concept. What children and young people are aware of is the power of documents in their lives. They are also profoundly aware of their own lack of power in the face of ever-changing regulations, corruption and, in some rare cases such as a boy whose father sold his birth certificate on the black market, unreliable family protection. When I asked children why they thought children such as themselves – children considered ‘foreign’ and treated as unwanted by the wider society until old enough to take up the kinds of menial labour performed by 17 Jacqueline Bhabha, ‘From Citizen to Migrant: The Scope of Child Statelessness in the Twenty-First Century’ in Jacqueline Bhabha (ed) Children without a State: A Global Human Rights Challenge (The MIT Press 2011). tilburg law review 19 (2014) 26-34