UNHCR, Statistical Reporting, and the Representation of Stateless People 73 based management tools, employing methodological approaches that put them at a considerable distance from the populations on whose behalf they claimed to be acting. They also set unrealistic targets. And as they worked to systematize their data, they reclassified those who no longer fell in neat categories and amalgamated them into other categories. Noting these failings, I conclude by recommending that rather than making humanitarian protection the servant of legal definitions or pursuing unattainable goals, relief agencies, donor governments, and researchers should recognize the lived experience of stateless people and embrace methodologically robust approaches to identification. from refugees to stateless persons: institutional developments Although the term “statelessness” is today treated as a social category in its own right, this is a relatively new trend. Statelessness was long considered a feature of forced displacement, and many of those who today we would describe as stateless were accepted as refugees by receiving states. This was especially true in Europe where the unraveling of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Empires gave rise to massive refugee flows. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, millions who fled had never enjoyed nationality to begin with, while others saw their nationality status canceled retrospectively or lost upon application for a second nationality, leaving them stateless in the interim. In the United States, for example, foreign-born men seeking to acquire US nationality were required to file a declaration of intent, at which point they would be forced to renounce any allegiance to another power. Yet they would often wait more than five years before they formally became US citizens, which required a court hearing. As for married women, they were simply assigned their husband’s nationality until the Cable Act of 1922.8 During the First World War and in the interwar period, states increasingly withdrew nationality to facilitate the expulsion of foreign-born groups. Torpey attributes this to the rise of the surveillance state and the use of immigration controls.9 For example, France denationalized foreign-born residents in 1915, three years before the new Soviet and Turkish governments denationalized Russian, Armenian, and Hungarian refugees. In the lead up to the Second World War, Fascist parties introduced racial laws, most famously in Germany (1935), where overnight the Nuremberg Laws divided Germans into “full citizens” and “citizens without political rights.” Following the Second World War, in Europe, stateless individuals and refugees were understood as equivalent and largely interchangeable categories. It is therefore 8 9 See The Cable Act 1922, ch. 411, 42 Stat. 1021 (also known as the “Married Women’s Independent Nationality Act”). J. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press