Birthright Citizenship Is America’s Safeguard Against Statelessness

by Karina Ambartsoumian-Clough, Executive Director, United Stateless

I was born in Odessa, Ukraine, USSR, and grew up in the shadow of the Soviet Union’s collapse. When countries dissolve, borders and governments are not the only things that disappear. For some people, citizenship disappears too.

I know what it means to live without citizenship.

I live in the United States without a country that recognizes me as a citizen. Statelessness is a strange condition. It means that something most people never question — belonging to a nation — becomes uncertain.

Without citizenship, ordinary parts of life become uncertain. Crossing state lines is easy enough, but traveling abroad is impossible without a passport. Even basic things — proving who you are, opening a bank account, applying for work — can turn into bureaucratic dead ends because no system is designed for people without a country.

Statelessness often sounds like a distant problem. In reality, it exists here in the United States.

An estimated 200,000 people in this country may be stateless or at risk of statelessness. They include refugees, children born into documentation gaps, and individuals whose citizenship was stripped away by political upheaval in other parts of the world.

I cofounded and I lead United Stateless, the only national organization in the United States run by people who have experienced statelessness. Through our legal clinic and community programs, we work with individuals who have spent years — sometimes decades — navigating life without nationality.

That experience is why the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision on birthright citizenship feels so consequential.

For more than 150 years, the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment has guaranteed that anyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen. This principle has shaped American democracy and quietly functioned as one of the strongest protections against statelessness in the world. 

Birthright citizenship ensures that every child born in the United States begins life with a legal identity and a place in the political community.

If the Supreme Court weakens this protection, the consequences could reach far beyond immigration policy.

Children born in the United States could find themselves without citizenship if their parents cannot pass nationality to them. Many countries restrict citizenship transmission abroad or require documentation that migrant families often cannot provide. Without birthright citizenship, some children born here could fall into nationality gaps that leave them stateless at birth. 

Around the world, statelessness often becomes an intergenerational condition. Children born without nationality grow up unable to pass citizenship to their own children, creating communities that remain without legal recognition for decades.

The United States has largely avoided this problem because of birthright citizenship.

But weakening that safeguard could open the door to something the country has never experienced before: a population of people born on American soil who have no country that claims them.

At United Stateless, we see how fragile legal status can be.

Many of our clients cannot obtain passports because no government recognizes them as citizens. Others face the threat of immigration detention despite having no country to which they can be deported. Many spend years trying to prove an identity that no system was designed to recognize.

But we also see moments that remind us why citizenship matters.

In 2024, one of our clients, Henry Pachnowski, became a U.S. citizen at the age of 83. A Holocaust survivor, Henry spent decades stateless, navigating legal barriers that kept him from citizenship. After years of advocacy to reopen his case and remove those obstacles, he was finally able to naturalize.

Watching him take the oath was unforgettable. After a lifetime of legal limbo, he finally had what most Americans receive automatically at birth: the certainty that he belongs.

Birthright citizenship ensures that no child born in the United States has to spend decades searching for that belonging.

The Supreme Court’s decision will shape whether that promise continues.

At stake is not only a constitutional interpretation. It is a question about the kind of country the United States chooses to be.

For more than a century, birthright citizenship has ensured that children born here start life with something powerful and simple: recognition.

It tells them that they belong.