Living Statelessness in the Legal ‘in-between’ : Migrants from Thailand in Japan

January 2025

In this blog entry, Bongkot Napaumporn argues the legal definition of statelessness cannot be applied easily in practice, particularly in a migratory context. In real life, some migrants are confined to a legal vacuum, being outside the boundary of national identity and also external to the internationally accepted statelessness identity. Using her empirical findings, she examines different degrees of statelessness and nationality problemsranging from being denied as nationals by law to lacking a certain ID to prove their belonging.

What motivates my current academic journey began 12 years ago. I remember vividly, it was in the rainy season of 2012, in Bangkok, when I met the mother of a stateless ethnic Vietnamese man who had been stranded in Japan for over 20 years. She came to Thammasat University’s legal clinic asking us to help her adult son who was suffering from illness without any access to medical treatment in Japan. Lawyers, civil society organisations and academia in Japan and Thailand, including myself, collaborated in supporting this case. Finally, this man reunited with his family in Thailand, had his Thai nationality confirmed and got his first Thai ID card at the age of 43. He lived with his family for a few more months and died peacefully. After that, I travelled back and forth between Thailand and Japan to learn more about the situation of other stateless people from Thailand who are left behind in Japan.

In the summer of 2022 in Melbourne, I started my PhD journey and I chose to delve into this issue of onward movement of stateless persons from Thailand to Japan. During my fieldwork in Japan, I interviewed stakeholders including people with lived experience of statelessness from Thailand. I found many groups of migrants from Thailand who are not legally stateless but living their lives as if they were. I realised that people in real life do not always fit within the binary classification of being either stateless or nationals. In addition to stateless ethnic Vietnamese from Thailand in Japan whom I have known for years, I got to know others who are living in a grey area of this legal classification. They are neither considered as stateless persons according to the legal definition, nor provided with a full protection as a national from the country of their nationality. These people include, for example, Thai nationals who have overstayed a visa for decades and lost the required documents to prove their Thai nationality. Some have lost connection with the family in Thailand, the only evidence showing their connection to the country.

It was in the autumn of 2023 in Tokyo that I met Wipa (pseudonym), a 19-year-old Thai girl (the majority age in Thailand is 20) who has a mild autism spectrum disorder. Wipa looks very much like a typical Japanese girl speaking Japanese fluently. Her mother is from a northern province of Thailand, but no one knows who her father is. Similar to many other female migrants, Wipa’s mother came to Japan during the 1990s when the demand for ‘entertainers’ to serve Japan’s entertainment industry was at its peak. The common pattern was that illegal brokers provided these female migrants a forged passport with a three-month visa. This made it difficult for them to ask for assistance and return after their visa expired. Many including Wipa’s mother decided to stay on illegally. While giving birth to Wipa, her mother had already overstayed a visa in Japan for decades. She decided not to report the birth because she was afraid that she would be detained and deported back to Thailand. Despite having Thai nationality from her mother (under the jus sanguinis principle), Wipa had been undocumented and unable to exercise her rights as a Thai national for many years. With support from a Japanese civil society organisation,Wipa’s mother managed to retrieve all her Thai identity documents and get a proper legal status staying in Japan. After her mother’s legal status was settled, Wipa was able to be recognised as a Thai national. At the Thai embassy in Tokyo, she received a delayed birth certificate and her first Thai passport.

By an unfortunate twist of fate, not so long after that, Wipa lost her mother from cervical cancer. Having no relatives and legal guardians in Japan, she had to stay in a local child centre. Wipa had just been released when she reached 18. While trying to adapt herself to living independently, Wipa found out that she had a problem with her Thai identity documents. She was told that she could not renew her passport anymore unless she has a Thai ID card. The Thai embassy suggested that every Thai child born overseas, including Wipa, needs a Thai ID card to renew their passport, and issuance of the first Thai ID card can only be done in Thailand.

Having been raised as Japanese, Wipa has little idea about Thailand. She knows no one there and cannot speak the language. Going back to Thailand with no ties with or knowledge of the country and no ability to connect with anyone there is thus frightening for her. Some might be lucky to have relatives in Thailand who are willing to provide support, but Wipa seems to have no one. I had many questions and concerns about Wipa’s future, but one thing I realised is that Wipa’s legal status is fragile and depends very much on just that piece of paper called an ‘ID card’.

Japan is not a party to statelessness conventions, but, to some extent, respects that stateless people are protected by international law. However, the understanding of statelessness in Japan is still limited, with no official definition of stateless persons nor procedure to protect stateless people. The international regime defines the problem of statelessness but within the narrow legal category of de jure statelessness. Thus, many migrants in Japan and elsewhere who lack ‘effective nationality’ fall outside the international protection due to the strict identification of statelessness problems. Wipa’s story is just one among many other stories of the similar struggles I learned during my fieldwork in Japan.

The summer is well on its way here in Melbourne. I am re-listening to those interviews on repeat and thinking how best to organise and present these stories in my thesis. I hope to highlight these real-life situations to demonstrate ‘a spectrum of different degrees of statelessness and nationality problems,’ particularly in the context of migration. I hope the struggles of these stateless and Thai migrants can emphasise the complexity of the relationship between states, individual and identity. Ultimately, I have hope that my research findings can contribute to problematising the effectiveness of the categorisation of statelessness, by amplifying the realities faced by these people with lived experience in their daily lives.

_{Image by  Ash Edmonds on Unsplash}