and potentially at-risk of statelessness live in mortgaged homes. A further 7.9 percent lived in homes owned free and clear. While potentially stateless persons and those at risk of statelessness have established strong roots in the United States, their rates of homeownership remain below national averages. CMS’s provisional estimates do not represent a definitive count of US stateless persons or persons at risk of statelessness. An unknown number of persons in each profile possess the nationality of their country of origin or a third country. For this reason, these estimates may overestimate the numbers of stateless persons in the United States. However, these estimates also omit groups of persons who are potentially stateless or at-risk or statelessness who do not appear in the ACS data and may not fit the profiles set forth above, which could contribute to undercount. In addition to stateless populations that cannot be found in the ACS, CMS’s estimates may omit: • Persons who were not registered in their country of birth and who lack citizenship in their country of origin, in a third country, and in the United States. • Children who were born in refugee camps located in countries without birthright citizenship. Many of these persons are stateless since their countries of origins either will not recognize their citizenship or lack the capacity to do so. • Persons who are stateless due to laws that prevent the transmission of citizenship from mothers to children, or due to divorce or birth out of wedlock. Such persons come from many countries and cannot be identified using the ACS. • Individuals who have been de-nationalized by their countries of origin who have not yet obtained another nationality. This potentially includes those de-nationalized for political, religious, or ethnic reasons, as well as those deemed threats to national security. • Persons who renounced or rejected their birth citizenship without acquiring citizenship in the United States or elsewhere. Members of some groups, such as Druze from the Golan Heights, voluntarily remain stateless as they perceive that acquiring nationality to which they are entitled constitutes the recognition and legitimation of their homeland’s occupation. • Children adopted illegally overseas and children born overseas to surrogate mothers with donor egg and sperm. These estimates may also be biased if ACS respondents misrepresent their country of birth, ethnicity, language, or US citizenship. Some stateless persons may not answer questions on ethnicity or language truthfully out of fear of persecution, removal, or hope to become a US citizen. These same factors, however, may contribute to scrupulous accuracy in responding to these questions for fear of running afoul of the government. Finally, the ACS may miss small stateless groups or those that speak languages for which translation is not available. Despite the ACS’s large sample size, many US stateless groups likely number less than a few hundred individuals. The ACS may miss some of these small groups. Moreover, the ACS questionnaire is only available in English and Spanish, and interpretation and assistance are 59