20131 STATELESS IN THE UNITED STATES 451 that status.3 3 The 2010 Expert Meeting on the Concept of Stateless Persons at Prato, Italy, further refined the meaning of statelessness in functional terms: an individual is stateless "if all states to which he or she has a factual link fail to consider the person as a national." 34 No formal process determines that an individual is de facto stateless. Rather, it is an ad hoc classification applicable when an individual is either unable to prove his citizenship, or his country of origin refuses to recognize his citizenship. The definitions of statelessness in the two international conventions have been widely recognized as deficient in recognizing the full scope of the problem.3 5 Moreover, relatively few nations are parties to the conventions, leading some commentators to despair of a concerted international effort to address a problem of "significant magnitude and severe consequence." 36 By contrast, every UN member nation-with the exception of the United States and Somalia-has signed on to and ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, signifying widespread agreement with its mandate that every child has a right to a nationality at birth.3 7 While this Article focuses on the Western Hemisphere, the phenomenon is and has been worldwide. Recent examples of statelessness across the. globe include children born in Thailand whose mothers entered the country illegally,3 8 similar problems in 33. In international law, the terms nationality and citizenship are often used interchangeably; I also employ them as equivalents in this Article. See SOUTHWICK & LYNCH, supra note 11, at 1 (explaining that both terms are used to define membership by states). 34. Laura Bingham, Julia Harrington Reddy & Sebastian Kohn, De Jure Statelessness in the Real World: Applying the Prato Summary Conclusions, OPEN Soc'Y FOUNDS. 4 (2011), http://www.soros.org/sites/default/files/prato-statelessness20110303.pdf. 35. See LAURA VAN WAAS, NATIONALITY MATTERS: STATELESSNESS UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAw 19-27 (2008) (explaining certain deficiencies found in the 1954 and 1961 Conventions). 36. Id. at 27. The number of parties to the 1954 Convention is seventy-six, while the number of parties to the 1961 Convention is fifty. See Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons: Status, UNITED NATIONS TREATY COLLECTION, http://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetailsII.aspx?&src=TREATY&mtdsg-no=V-3&chapt er=5&lang=en (last visited Feb. 20, 2013); see also Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness: Status, UNITED NATIONS TREATY COLLECTION, http://treaties.un.org/ Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?mtdsg-no=V-4&chapter=5&lang=en (last visited Feb. 20, 2013). 37. See Convention on the Rights of the Child art. 7, Nov. 20, 1989, 1577 U.N.T.S. 3, (providing that children will have the right to a name and "the right to acquire a nationality"); see also Convention on the Rights of the Child: Status, UNITED NATIONS TREATY COLLECTION, http://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src= TREATY&mtdsg no=IV-11&chapter=4&lang-en (last visited Feb. 20, 2013). 38. See Milbrandt, supra note 12, at 78-79 (finding that many children born in hospitals or villages were not given identification papers).