Chapter One Jus Soli and Statelessness A Comparative Perspective from the Americas Polly J. Price The New World is comparatively generous in the law’s provision of citizenship to all persons born within national boundaries, including the children of undocumented persons and temporary visitors. A striking feature of citizenship practices in the Americas is the near uniformity of reliance on jus soli. Indeed, the jus soli principle “has primarily become a Western Hemisphere tradition” (Etzioni 2007, 353). The predominance of jus soli is said to account for the relatively low rate of statelessness in the Americas compared with other parts of the world.1 Some experts claim the Western Hemisphere is “indisputably the region with the fewest people affected by statelessness” (Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion 2014, 8). But the definitions of “stateless” in international law instruments and in practice lack precision and thus confound easy measurements of political, civic, and economic status. As the introduction to this volume notes, merely possessing citizenship as a formal matter conceals the problem of governments treating their own citizens as foreigners, both deliberately and because of indifferent or incompetent administration. As a result of decisions on the ground, even the most expansive laws mandating citizenship at birth fail to alleviate fundamental deprivations of human rights. As many chapters in this book discuss, authorities may withhold recognition and thus produce an 1 Electroniccopy copyavailable available at: at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3150558 Electronic https://ssrn.com/abstract=3150558