Stateless Transnational Migrant Children in South Africa TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATION AND STATELESSNESS Previously, young men were the ones who often migrated. This has changed and women, children and the elderly now form part of recent migration trends. Notably, the feminization of migration has been on the increase. In addition, due to pre-migration situations in their home countries, migrants show a willingness to take “the unpopular 3D jobs – dirty, difficult and dangerous…though a valuable asset to the national economy, it also means that the number of irregular migrants will continue to grow, remain un-deportable and states continue to concede to the demand for 3I labor – inexpensive, imported and irregular” (Van Waas, 2007: 442-443). As time progresses, the child migrants grow up, and adult male and female irregular migrants find partners (either fellow migrants or local nationals) and get married. This results in the inevitable expansion of the family. Given that states are signatories to international human rights conventions, these migrants remain in a state of irregularity and cannot be returned due to humanitarian reasons, i.e. non-refoulement. On the other hand, though controversial and no country will readily admit this, countries turn a blind eye and do not return migrants due to the economic benefits that the country derives from migrant labor – legal or illegal. This is partly what Bourdieu (1998 in Ball et al. 2014: 7) referred to as “flexploitation” – flexible exploitation of vulnerabilities in varying forms including low pay and unsafe working conditions. Furthermore, several studies have noted that undocumented migrants often remain invisible to authorities in their country of settlement either by choosing to do so or simply out of necessity (Van Waas, 2007). Without legal identity documents that enable children of undocumented migrants access to entitlements associated with citizenship, their options are fewer, their futures are bleak, (Lynch, 2010) they end up as products of inter-generational statelessness and they may follow in their parents’ footsteps of doing low-skilled exploitative wage work (Ball et al., 2017). Even in death, stateless people are invisible people (Lynch and Teff, 2009). Statelessness and undocumented migration are on the increase (Ball et al., 2014). Stateless people sometimes find that their predicaments in their own home countries are untenable and they resort to migration as their only option (Foster and Lambert, 2016; Menz, 2016). Migration itself can also cause statelessness such as when migrants lose their documentation during the journey. Depending on their circumstances especially as linked to loss of all identity records and evidence of nationality, the migrants are unable to establish citizenship with a particular country and prove their nationality. Migration can also create confusion in cases where one cannot tell if the individuals are stateless or if they simply have challenges proving their nationality. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure the protection of stateless people within the migration framework. As such, the Abidjan Declaration as adopted in 2015 by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) member states, on the eradication of statelessness in West Africa, encouraged countries to tackle migration as a factor that leads to statelessness. Effectively identifying and addressing the issue of statelessness within a mixed migration context has been largely ignored and war11