38.2 (7) TEMPROSA.DOCX38.2 (7) TEMPROSA.DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 2020] STATELESSNESS AS RHETORIC 1/16/2021 12:59 PM 243 and duties associated with being a citizen of a State. 3 Scholars argue that this discretion over citizenship is declining. 4 Everyone has the right to nationality under international law, and citizenship is slipping out of the State's control. 5 Yet, the State still controls much of citizenship and the lack of it—statelessness. The State is the overwhelming gatekeeper of citizenship. Even in today's globalized world, the State continues to possess authority to govern its borders. 6 The authority is not reposed upon an international parliament or people. In fact, since 9/11, there is a steady rise of laws opening up citizenship to the privileged, while restricting access to or stripping citizenship for the disadvantaged in the name of national security, the economy, national unity, and a host of other reasons. 7 The inclusion and exclusion of collectives from political communities is an enduring theme of history. In the United States, perhaps no other case has so captured disdain for utter racism than Dred Scott v. Sandford, where the US Supreme Court declared that black people "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States." 8 By a stroke of the racist pen, the court condemned countless African-Americans lives to slavery. Today, there are moves at exclusion, including a reconfiguring of birthright citizenship and border controls. The US Supreme Court declared as arbitrary and capricious the decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protected undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. 9 Elsewhere, exclusionary regimes reign and threaten peoples' livelihood. The case before the ICJ against Myanmar claims that the persecution of the Rohingya for decades had been made possible, among others, by the enactment of a citizenship law that stripped the Rohingya of citizenship. 10 India's National Register of Citizens, published in 3. Ayelet Shachar, Rainer Bauböck, Irene Bloemraad & Maarten Vink, Introduction: Citizenship—Quo Vadis?, in THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF CITIZENSHIP 3, 8 (Ayelet Shachar et al. eds., 2017). 4. See e.g., DAVID JACOBSON, RIGHTS ACROSS BORDERS: IMMIGRATION AND THE DECLINE OF CITIZENSHIP 9 (1996) (arguing that the distinction between citizen and alien has eroded because rights are more and more predicated on residency); Linda Bosniak, Citizenship Denationalized, 7 IND. J. GLOB. LEGAL STUD. 447, 449–50 (2000) (arguing that efforts to conceive of citizenship beyond the nation-state are coherent and desirable). Certainly, I agree that thinking of citizenship as a changing or changed concept has merits, States nonetheless still control access to citizenship, as well as to its bundle of rights and duties. 5. JACOBSON, supra note 4. 6. Id. at 6. 7. For an excellent review of the shifts in formal legal citizenship, see Catherine Dauvergne, Citizenship with a Vengeance, 8(2) THEORETICAL INQ. L. (2007). 8. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, 404–05 (1857). 9. Dep't of Homeland Sec. v. Regents of the Univ. of Cal., 591 U.S. __, 140 S.Ct. 1891 (2020). 10. See Priya Pillai, State Responsibility for Citizenship in India: Lessons for Myanmar, and the CERD Inter-State Communications Mechanism, OPINIOJURIS (Dec. 12, 2019), http://opiniojuris.org/2019/12/21/state-responsibility-for-citizenship-in-india-lessons-from-myanmar-and-the-cerdinter-state-communications-mechanism/.