“I’m always worried that my friends are getting sick of me staying at their homes and eating their food without contributing anything. I know that they must talk behind my back and that is why I always try to avoid staying in one place for too long.” Underpinning everything is his frustration and despair about not being able to get on with his life. “My biggest worry is staying like this, doing nothing. I did not think it would be such a problem to work and support myself in a developed country like the UK. I have no work, no place to stay, nothing. [Being stateless] really does affect it a lot. Since I was nine years old I have been a person without status. I had problems in Darjeeling but coming here has not solved anything. Even if it was dangerous for me in Darjeeling at least I had a place to stay and enough to eat.” “This is really killing me. Every morning I wake up it’s the same thing, the same question about what I will do that day. If I was allowed to stay in the UK I could move forward with my life, I would try to get into the restaurant business as I have the skills to do this.” He finds it hard to see a future. He has told the UK Border Agency that if he could be given either Bhutanese or Indian citizenship then he would be happy to return voluntarily to either country. As a stateless person he cannot. Nischal is stuck without rights or status in the UK, with no solution in sight. 4.1 Introduction Nischal’s story reflects many of the challenges that stateless persons who do not have an immigration status in the UK face on a daily basis. His situation is exceptional because the Tribunal has recognised that he is stateless. However, it is no accident that this recognition has not resulted in the regularisation of his immigration status. It is not caused by a failure in administration but, rather, by the legal and policy framework that is currently applied by the Secretary of State for the Home Department to stateless persons in the UK who do not have leave to enter or remain. For these purposes, the fact that Nischal is stateless is ignored. In contrast to Nischal, for the majority of the participants in the study, no finding of statelessness has been made. Their statelessness remains “hidden” within the current framework and, like Nischal, no solution is immediately available to them. This is the first of two complementary chapters. It will begin by describing the profile of the individuals who were referred to the researchers to provide context. It will then describe how the way in which UK immigration law and policy has treated those who are identified as stateless under the 1954 Convention has changed over time. At the time of writing, stateless persons who are not entitled to asylum or complementary protection are unable to regularise their immigration status on the basis of their statelessness and gain access to many of the rights to which they are entitled to under the 1954 Convention and international human rights law. There is also no mechanism established in law which allows for the fact that they are stateless to be identified. The chapter will continue to examine the current problems that exist in identifying stateless persons on the territory, which could be solved by adopting a specific procedure to identify stateless persons. Chapter 5 will continue to examine the human rights challenges that result from the failure to appropriately identify stateless persons and the current domestic legal and policy framework that is applied to them, particularly in areas other than immigration control. 64 Mapping statelessness