In 1992, when Tatianna Lesnikova’s son, David, was 15, she feared for his life. The Soviet government had already taken her eldest son in 1989 when he was 16 and committed him to a mental hospital for speaking out in school against the government. Now she was afraid that the new Ukrainian government—controlled by many of the same people who had been in charge under the Soviets—was trying to do the same.
So she fled. To the US, where she entered life as a ghost. Under US law, Lesnikova doesn’t exist, because she’s stateless. Like Tom Hank’s character in The Terminal, her country doesn’t recognize her and the US doesn’t want her.
Across the U.S., thousands of stateless people are stuck in legal limbo, unlike refugees or illegal immigrants who have clear procedural pathways though our legal system and, more key to the issue, have a tie to another country. If the government chooses, asylum seekers or illegal immigrants can be removed from the U.S. and sent back to a country of origin, but stateless people cannot be sent anywhere because no country will recognize them as their citizen.
Accurate numbers are hard to come by, but according to UNHCR, the U.S. has no more than 10,000, a fraction of 1 percent of the U.S. population.
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