Leaving No One Behind: Statelessness and the Sustainable Development Goals Community security Communities in which many people are stateless often lack effective protection from police, since they are not seen as an important constituency for protection. Indeed, they are often the subject of police harassment, something that affects all those resident in the community, including those who are not stateless. Members of the “sea-nomad” communities in South East Asia, for example, are often perceived as a security threat, while simultaneously being excluded from State services and subjected to repeated expulsions.134 Roma and others living in Roma-majority neighbourhoods in European States may be subjected to police raids and identity document checks, with the attendant shake-downs for those who do not have the right identity document. These raids affect the entire community, even those who are recognized as nationals and have the correct documents.135 Lack of documents enabling legal work may also drive stateless persons not only into exploitative and unauthorized work, but also into crime for lack of other options to sustain themselves. Secure legal status is critical for migrants to be able to integrate into and contribute to peaceful and inclusive societies; research has especially emphasized reducing the barriers to accessing nationality for those born in a country to avoid negative outcomes.136 In the context of irregular migration, it has been found that regularization of legal status reduces the propensity of immigrant populations to commit crime as a means of making a living.137 The same principles apply with even greater force to stateless populations who are treated as irregular migrants. In summary, statelessness undermines social cohesion, while recognition or grant of nationality promotes it: The most important reason to recognize people as their citizens, is that it is them making and shaping the country. If you don’t recognize all your citizens, you don’t have a country. It brings people together. (Kenyan Nubian man 26).138 State security Systematic denial of nationality to a large percentage of the population who have no other place they can call home ultimately destabilizes the State itself.139 In extreme circumstances, denial of nationality to particular groups may be the cause of mass expulsion from the territory, or conflict may break out over the status of particular groups in that State, leading to the forced displacement of those whose nationality is contested and those considered to be nationals of the State. Perhaps the most eloquent statement of this impact was made by a then rebel leader and later prime minister of Côte d’Ivoire, who emphasized the arbitrary deprivation of nationality as the primary cause of the civil war in Côte d’Ivoire: “Give us our identity cards and we’ll hand over our Kalashnikovs”.140 Commitments to reform citizenship law and ensure the equitable issue of identity documents are often at the centre of agreements to resolve a political or military conflict or the drafting of new constitutions. 134. Human Rights Watch, “Stateless at sea: the Moken of Burma and Thailand”, June 2015, www.hrw.org/report/2015/06/25/stateless-sea/moken-burmaand-thailand; Greg Acciaioli, Helen Brunt, and Julian Clifton, “Foreigners everywhere, nationals nowhere: exclusion, irregularity, and invisibility of stateless Bajau Laut in eastern Sabah, Malaysia”, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 15, No. 3 (2017): 232–49, https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948. 2017.1319526. 135. Iulius Rostas, “ID checks and police raids: ethnic profiling in Central Europe”, in Justice Initiatives: Ethnic Profiling by Police in Europe (New York: Open Society Justice Initiative, 2005), www.justiceinitiative.org/publications/justice-initiatives-ethnic-profiling-police-europe. 136. Long et al., “Citizenship, migration and the 2030 Agenda”. 137. Fasani, “Understanding the role of immigrants’ legal status”. 138. Interviewed Kibera, August 2023. 139. Constantin Sokoloff, “Denial of citizenship: a challenge to human security” (New York: UN Advisory Committee on Human Security, 2005), 76. 140. “Donnez-nous des cartes d'identité, et nous rendrons nos Kalachnikov!”; Guillaume Soro quoted in Christian Bouquet, “La crise ivoirienne par les cartes”, Géoconfluences, June 2007, https://geoconfluences.ens-lyon.fr/doc/etpays/Afsubsah/AfsubsahDoc5.htm. See also “Côte d'Ivoire : un combat pour l'identité”, IRIN, 2 November 2005 https://reliefweb.int/report/c%C3%B4te-divoire/c%C3%B4te-divoire-un-combat-pour-lidentit%C3%A9. 39