JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 977 – what Constable called the migratory cycle of atonement (Constable 2014, 9). This tendency was also confirmed in my interviews. Children belonging to this category – here, I call them abandoned children, building on Constable’s ‘abandoned baby’ (2018, 170) – gradually lose their chances to acquire nationalities through their childhood and acknowledge their statelessness in adulthood. Gonzales and Chavez noted that undocumented 1.5generation Latino immigrants who grew up in U.S. society became aware of their lack of legal residency later (2012, 267). This also happened to the abandoned children mentioned in my interviews. The second category (14/24) includes children found by the immigration bureau when their parent(s) were discovered as undocumented migrants and sentenced to be deported (1/24 was exceptional and difficult to categorise) (Ishii and Azukisawa 2019, 25). As their parents were sent to detention centres, the children lived in orphanages until deportation. Such children are stateless in the orphanage but usually acquire their passport/nationality from their parents’ home countries. The children belonging to this category legally or officially recover their nationality and escape statelessness. Based on these results, two possible examination targets are found – abandoned children and children deported to unknown homelands. Abandoned children are those who were left behind in the midst of their migrant parents’ migration trajectories and later lost contact with their parents. Deported children are those found with unauthorised migrant parent(s) who temporally stayed at orphanages while their parents were at detention centres prior to deportation. Such deported children tended to be de facto stateless at the time of discovery as well as during their stay at the orphanages. However, officials of both countries (deporting country and receiving country) pursue procedures to recover the nationality of these children from their parent(s)’ home country and to prepare passports for deportation. While such children in orphanages seem to be stateless, they recover their nationality later and are deported to that country of nationality, where they have never been. Herein, I focus on abandoned children and examine the legal and social structures that prevent them from acknowledging the risk of statelessness during their childhood and make them realise it only when it is too late (nearing adulthood). In this paper, I present two vignettes illustrating abandoned children’s typical trajectories, analysed because the research results were highly sensitive for children and their parent(s). It was almost impossible to obtain informed consent from all the individuals related to the children. Children do not always understand their situation precisely (as described below). Presumably, this is also because the reality of their ‘situation’ is not, in fact, clear to anyone. These interviews provide additional data that could not be obtained through the questionnaires, especially information on what happens to abandoned children after they reach adulthood. Although scholars have recently emphasised the importance of child-centred research (Hoang et al. 2015, 274), this study’s data were collected through orphanage staff members who dealt directly with nationality issues. The children’s perspectives (Alipio, Lu, and Yeoh 2015, 258), agency (Allerton 2016, 6), emoscapes (Chakraborty and Thambiah 2018, 583), and emotions (Beazley, Butt, and Ball 2018, 591) have been illuminated in recent studies. However, during my empirical studies, direct access to abandoned children was denied by orphanage regulations for privacy reasons. This paper does not attempt to analyse the children’s perceptions of their situation. Instead, it uses interviews and records