Fadi “The legal part of citizenship aside, to be called a citizen of a country is something I’ve always wanted. I wanted to belong somewhere.” Before coming to Australia I never fit in any bucket. I could never find any pathway, process, policy, or law that included me or talked about people in my situation. And all that changed the minute I landed in Australia. It’s almost as if I was born the day I landed here, legally speaking. Unfortunately, there’s a big gap in countries like Lebanon, where they haven’t signed the United Nations Statelessness Conventions. People have no rights, and no legal pathway exists for them. As someone who grew up and lived most of my life stateless in Lebanon, seeing Australia’s different approach was absolutely amazing. I cannot describe the happiness and security I felt. I felt welcomed, I felt seen, and I felt respected as a human being for the first time in my life. I managed to get a driver’s licence, open a bank account, and get my name on a lease. I leased my own apartment within the first five months of coming here. And yet, if you look back, for 28 years in Lebanon, I had no birth certificate, no driver’s licence, no bank account, no last name, no legal presence of any kind; I didn’t exist anywhere. After more than 20 years of living as a stateless person in Lebanon, I couldn’t find a way out of statelessness, and every road was a dead end. At first, because I was born in Lebanon and my mother was Lebanese, I tried the Lebanese pathway, and all roads were blocked. And then, because I was half Syrian, I tried the Syrian pathway; all roads were blocked. Then I went to the UNHCR, and again, unfortunately, I didn’t tick any of their boxes for resettlement because I was a healthy single male who had a roof over his head. I had a mother who looked after me. I also had a couple of good Samaritans along the way who helped me get access to education and work. Because of that, I wasn’t eligible for resettlement. So basically, I’d exhausted every option whilst in Lebanon. Naturally, I started to look for other options overseas. I started reaching out to international NGOs, and this was when I came across Talent Beyond Boundaries (TBB). Initially, I was out of their scope as well because they were only targeting skilled Syrian refugees who escaped the war in Syria. The first conversation with TBB was—surprise, surprise—”Oh, I’m sorry, you’re not a Syrian refugee, you’ve not escaped the war, you were born in Lebanon.” But again—and you find that this is a recurring theme in my story—there is a good person, a good Samaritan, who just looked at my situation and made an exception to include me or help me. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here. So that’s, I think, why my story is so unique. It’s not about me as a person; it’s about me coming across exceptional people who are willing to make an effort and actually try to find a solution to my problem. The local office of TBB in Beirut was very sympathetic to my situation. 86 Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness | Understanding Statelessness in Australia Fadi as a baby with mother Hiam. Photo supplied by Fadi. In my case, I was offered and accepted a job at a consulting company in Australia. A TBB employee contacted their connection at a consulting company to let them know they had a prime candidate: “He has the skills. He just needs your support to get out of Lebanon.” This is how I was matched with the consulting company; from there, it was a very straightforward interview process. Eventually, I ticked all the boxes and got a job offer. That’s when the real fun began because, I had a job offer but no legal documents. This was when the full strength of TBB’s legal team, the consulting company’s legal team, and a couple of lawyers who joined in from a pro bono perspective huddled together to try and figure out, “How do we legally get this person, who never legally existed, transferred onto this visa from Beirut to Sydney?” I think that took more than a year to solve. TBB had secured a small number of Subclass 482 Temporary Skill Shortage visas from the Australian government to pilot the program. This temporary visa lets employers sponsor a suitably skilled worker to fill a position they can’t find a suitably skilled Australian to fill. I still needed to meet the visa requirements, which was a lot of work. I cannot speak more highly of how I was treated.