76 Cheong functions as a mechanism by which the monarchy protects the cultural, economic, and religious interests of the dominant Malay majority, often to the detriment of other groups. Those who fall outside of this category are not automatically entitled to citizenship, regardless of whether they were born on Bruneian soil. Instead, they are given stateless permanent residence status, and are issued International Certificates of Identity in lieu of Bruneian passports.2 Like many other stateless peoples around the world, they are not only denied legal membership to the country in which they live, but they are also unable to make claims to fundamental civil, political, economic, or social rights. Confronted by these constraints on an everyday basis, stateless ChineseBruneians have increasingly turned to permanent out-migration as a strategy for responding to this institutionalized marginalization. Along with the United Kingdom and Australia, Canada has been a popular destination country. In the present day, there are 4825 Bruneian immigrants residing in Canada, most of whom are formerly stateless Chinese who have settled in either Vancouver or Edmonton.3 To echo one of the respondents: Why study a marginal minority of a faraway microstate? For one, systemic human rights violations should not be disregarded merely on the basis of the size of the populations affected. Secondly, despite being small in number, the case of Chinese-Bruneians who have moved to Canada is instructive for understanding the connections between citizenship and migration, precisely because citizenship (or more accurately, the lack thereof) figured so prominently in their everyday lives. By comparing the ways in which stateless Chinese-Bruneian immigrants talked about their experiences in Brunei and Canada, we can also make sense of how citizenship policies can affect people’s interpretations of their relationships to the State, and how these interpretations can shift as they move from one national environment to another. In total, 13 semi-structured interviews were conducted with ChineseBruneians who had settled in Vancouver, Canada, from anywhere between 1 and 38 years. The majority had naturalized in 3 to 4 years of coming to Canada, with the exception of 2 people who took 6 years and 2 who had only recently arrived as permanent residents and were not yet eligible to apply for citizenship. There were 8 men and 5 women in total, ranging from 27 to 75 years of age. The oral history method was selected in order to provide a human face to a 2 Roger Kershaw, ‘Brunei: Malay, Monarchical Micro-state’ in John Funston (ed), Government and Politics in Southeast Asia (Zed Books 2001). 3 Statistics Canada, ‘Canadian Immigration Statistics, 1966-2012’ <http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/ 100/202/301/immigration_statistics-ef/index.html> accessed 3 April 2012. tilburg law review 19 (2014) 74-80