The Dominican government continues to assert that even children born of Haitian parents who were legal permanent residents cannot be registered as Dominican nationals. Government officials have taken strong measures against providing citizenship to persons of Haitian descent born in the country whose parents were unable to document their legal stay in the country. These measures included refusals to renew Dominican birth and identity documents. The government stated that such refusals were based on evidence of fraudulent documentation, but advocacy groups alleged that the moves targeted persons whose parents were Haitian or whose names sounded Haitian and constituted acts of denationalization. Thousands of Dominican-born persons of Haitian descent lack citizenship or identity documents. The U.S. Department of State characterizes these persons as “effectively stateless,” adopting the favored modern terminology while avoiding the de facto and de jure categorizations from the earlier round of conventions related to nationality (U.S. Department of State 2012a; Fullerton 2014). Elsewhere in the Americas, examples of “effective statelessness” include individuals who lack any documentation to prove the location of their birth, and those who migrate to or seek refuge in another country that does not recognize them. Indigenous populations within Latin America are particularly susceptible to these problems. Civil conflicts exacerbate such problems, with large numbers of persons displaced by civil conflicts facing effective statelessness, despite eligibility for protection as refugees (see Lawrance, this volume).5 Several nations in Latin America have encountered significant numbers of refugees fleeing civil conflicts in Colombia and elsewhere. Some of these displaced persons seek regularization of their status by refugee applications in host countries, but many do not. In Brazil, for example, 17,500 unregistered Colombian refugees were thought to be 8 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3150558