Based on its research, CMS has identified a series of recommendations aimed at gaining a fuller understanding of the scope of this problem, addressing the challenges facing stateless persons, and dramatically reducing statelessness in the United States. These recommendations are made to a range of government, international, and non-governmental actors. • UNHCR should redouble its efforts to increase the number of signatories to the 1954 and 1961 Conventions, to support states in implementing these Conventions, to prevent and reduce statelessness, and to safeguard the rights of stateless persons. • UNHCR should establish regional advisory groups of states and civil society actors devoted to eliminating discrimination in nationality laws, closing gaps in nationality laws due to state succession, and responding to the conditions that create a risk of statelessness. • UNICEF and other relevant UN agencies should expand their efforts to ensure universal birth registration and birthright citizenship. • The United Nations Population Division, UNHCR, and other relevant UN agencies should work to harmonize procedures for collecting data on statelessness and produce annual reports on the global stateless population. • The United States should become a party to the 1954 and 1961 Conventions, and should harmonize its laws and policies with them (Baluarte 2015, 355, 389). • Congress should pass and the president should sign into law legislation that officially defines a stateless person and provides a designated path to lawful status and US citizenship for qualifying stateless persons.71 • Congress should also pass and the president should sign into law legislation that protects stateless persons from arbitrary deprivations of liberty, including repeat and prolonged detention and onerous conditions of supervision, unless they represent a national security or public safety threat. • All federal agencies that may encounter stateless persons should adopt standardized training, guidelines and procedures on how to detect and screen for statelessness, based on UNHCR’s Handbook on Protection of Stateless People and other guidance. Screening should preferably occur at the government’s first point of contact with persons who are potentially stateless or potentially at risk of statelessness. • DHS should eliminate domestic travel restrictions for stateless persons, and allow them to move and settle where they want in United States. 71 In recent years, two prominent pieces of legislation – the Senate-passed “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013” and the “Refugee Protection Act of 2016” – would have offered “conditional” status, work authorization, travel documents, and a path to permanent residence to de jure stateless persons meeting certain conditions (Magner 2016). 75