354 GEORGETOWN IMMIGRATION LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 29:351 statelessness. The section then goes on to explain how refugee law has been incorporated into U.S. immigration law, while the law of statelessness has not, and suggests that the U.S. experience with asylum law could be instrumental in efforts to identify and protect stateless persons. The second section describes how the failure of U.S. immigration law to account for stateless persons has created a legal limbo that engulfs an unknown number of stateless persons today. This section lays plain the inefficiencies of a system that conducts removal operations against persons who cannot practically be removed. The section further highlights the inhumanity of conducting such operations against internationally protected persons, and illustrates the human suffering that often results when they are kept in mandatory immigration detention and then monitored on immigration parole for the rest of their lives. Finally, this section explains how U.S. asylum law is ill-suited to provide necessary protection for stateless persons, and lends emphasis to the call for complementary protection under U.S. immigration law for this population. The third section of this article analyzes the proposed U.S. mechanism to protect stateless persons under the standards of the international law of statelessness. This analysis relies in part on an analogy to the U.S. experience with asylum protection, highlighting those areas in which international guidance has been crucial to establishing the proper scope of refugee protection. The section follows the framework provided by recently issued United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) guidance on statelessness protection and scrutinizes the definition of “stateless person” set forth in SB 744, the legal status contemplated for this protected group, and the determination procedures that must be implemented. This section demonstrates how a failure to follow international standards could give way to restrictive statutory interpretations and burdensome standards of proof and evidence that could undermine the goal of the law. The legal and factual complications inherent in making statelessness determinations require both a contextualized understanding of the problem of statelessness as well as analytical precision. International guidance on statelessness protection provides both, and there are important reasons for the United States to follow this guidance. First, the legal limbo to which stateless persons are currently condemned in the United States perpetuates the deleterious effects of human rights violations that stateless persons have often suffered at the hands of foreign powers. Additionally, detaining stateless persons as if they were removable, and conducting futile efforts to deport them squanders the resources of an overburdened system of immigration regulation. In effect, the stateless legal limbo distracts U.S. immigration authorities from their work to further the national security while they inadvertently contribute to the dehumanization of an internationally protected people. The United States should promulgate a system of protection Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2796321