In the eyes of a stateless child

MANILA, Philippines — Traffic, corruption, and slow Internet connection are just some of the problems the Philippines has been trying to solve. Add to this list poverty, injustice, violence and many more that catalyze our country’s retrogression.

Since we get to see and experience these negative things every day, we think these are the only ones that matter. But if we gaze through the looking glass, a tiny yet worsening issue becomes more palpable – statelessness.

Parallel with legal terms, a “stateless person” is someone who’s not considered as a national by any State under its law. Here, nationality refers to the legal bond between a person and a State. This bond can be best treated as a form of official membership, which bestows upon a national specific rights as well as duties – a global phenomenon that is also called “de jure stateless”.

According to researches, there are an estimated 12 million stateless people worldwide today; and over three million of these people reside in the State of Sabah in Malaysian Borneo, one third of which comprises people who illegally or legally migrated to Malaysia over the past 40 years, mainly from Indonesia and the Philippines.

The Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO) reported a 124-per cent increase in the number of undocumented Filipino migrants in Malaysia. From 200,000 in 2010, the number increased to 447,590 in 2011. This number swelled even further to 800,000 by the end of 2016. Many of these are illegal residents, some migrant workers, and a significant number (30,000) are stateless children based on data of the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of Education.

According to Nowhere People, a global organization for stateless people, for the thousands of undocumented people living and working in Malaysia, the fear of exposing their presence to authorities influences their decision whether or not to give birth in a hospital. As an aftermath, a huge chunk of population of children born in Sabah have no birth certificate and documentation, making them ineligible to enter public schools and afford health care. This is what makes them stateless and a “foreigner” for the remainder of their life.

We would think that these stateless children would just spend their lives living under a state of statelessness, dwelling on the streets, astray on alleys, but a documentary takes a hard look into the eyes of a stateless child and shows that they won’t settle for anything less. Once in a while, they grab the chance to study in their hidden makeshift school that is located on top of a mountain. They would trek muddy paths, walk through dangerous mountain edges, and risk their own lives for the sake of learning.

Some of them long to become teachers and lawyers; all of them want a better life.

Their dreams are just bigger than their fears and this is the reason why they walk for hours under tormenting heat just to reach school. A Filipino-Malaysian teacher in a makeshift school saw the passion, commitment, and dedication of these stateless children for education and realized that she really needs to teach them even under the shadow of trees, without tables and chairs, having only one corrugated chalk board.

Our country should start working with civil societies and take our advocacy efforts to a higher level. We should begin collaborating with other UN agencies and international organizations to become more proactive in the war against statelessness. In harmony with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, we must work together to address the four areas of statelessness – identification, prevention, reduction and protection.

With the administration’s help, we ought to give them proper education and let them experience their rights, above all. We need to summon ourselves in the middle of nowhere because that’s where they are hiding. We need to carry them back to our country because they are the lost fragments of our nation. These stateless children are just stateless on paper, but they are missing threads of our own. Their being Filipino runs in the blood, not in the ink.

In case we’ve forgotten, they are just children with nowhere to go and no place to call home. Therewithal, our country is large enough to nestle these faultless beings. On top of everything, the Philippines is not a heartless country to keep these stateless children stateless.

Kent Harley Oñes is a Broadcast Communication student at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines. He is the associate editor of newsblog Ourchive.