2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) to the Thai state — visible because a Thai citizen identification card allows them to be officially ‘seen’ and ‘counted’ as full members; invisible because once full membership is conferred, in theory, they become one with the masses, holding the same blue coloured identification card as other Thai citizens. A Thai identification card is viewed as a pass to allow them to achieve full social and physical mobility and not have to be under constant threat of being arrested. However, this invisibility is precisely what the Thai state claims is dangerous. In the practice of connecting crimes, especially drug trafficking, to highlanders and migrants, the state views granting or not granting citizenship to highlanders and migrants — those deemed the unauthentic Thai — not as a matter of human rights but of national security. Subjected to the state’s prejudice, stateless persons in Thailand have been caught in what Malavika Reddy calls a ‘double bind’, whereby individuals are ‘mandated to be identifiable, via their papers, as singular individuals’ and at the same time, are stereotyped and perceived as indistinct members of a group. 100 For the villagers whose citizenship was withdrawn, their identity documents were collectively deemed by DSI as fraud. Instead of reexamining their individual documents to distinguish the genuine from the fabricated, the state agency applied a singular legal action across the board. In Nida’s case, for a moment, she was indistinguishable to district officials from another girl ‘with the same face’ and the same situation. Therefore, despite being required to be individually legible through personal documentation, stateless persons can be seen as all ‘the same’ to the officials. They become visible only as a group, not as individuals. Amal De Chickera and Laura Van Waas warn that ‘failing to distinguish between the stateless and those who lack documentation, and the failure to distinguish stateless persons who lack documentation, can lead to the wrong solutions’. 101 However, such distinctions are hard to make in the legal regime, whereby individuals are perceived as indistinct members of a group, and where the state officials are lost in the maze of the many sub-categories of non-citizen ‘others’, various legal amendments and numerous types of identification cards that the state has created over time. Overwhelmed by the constant policy changes and unable to make the kind of distinction postulated by de Chickera and van Waas, those representing the state often fall back upon the deeply-rooted stereotypical practice. 102 This knowledge gap within state administrative bodies partly accounts for why many stateless persons in many parts of the world are unable to benefit from theoretically inclusive legal reforms. 103 100 Malavika Reddy, ‘Identity Paper/Work/s and the Unmaking of Legal Status in Mae Sot, Thailand’, (2015) 2 Asian Journal of Law and Society 251, 263. 101 Laura Van Wass and Amal De Chickera, ‘Unpacking Statelessness’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 53, 65 (emphasis in original). 102 My informal interview with officers reveal that they often feel unequipped and underresourced to understand the complex Thai citizenship laws. 103 Brad Blitz gives an example from Sri Lanka, where stateless persons could not benefit from a simplified procedure to demonstrate proof of citizenship because state administration bodies were not fully aware of the legal arrangements following the changes in nationality law in 2003: Brad Blitz, ‘The State and the Stateless: the Legacy of Hannah Arendt Reconsidered’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 71, 77–78. 234