For a long moment, Henry Pachnowski sits in silence as he considers how it feels to live in the U.S. as a person who is stateless.
“I thought I was all alone,” Pachnowski tells me on a recent morning. “I had no idea there were other people.”
A few months ago, I shared with you the story of an American-born doctor who ended up stateless at age 61. He was born at a D.C. hospital and had been issued a birth certificate. But when he went to renew his passport, something he had previously done without encountering any problems, he received a letter from a State Department official informing him that he had not acquired U.S. citizenship at birth because his father at the time was a diplomat with the Embassy of Iran.
That letter left the Northern Virginia doctor in shock. It also left him in legal limbo. He went from believing he was a U.S. citizen, and held the rights that come with that, to not knowing when he might be able to travel outside the country again, whether he would be able to continue practicing medicine or if he would be eligible to receive benefits from a Social Security system that he had paid into for decades.
After that column ran, I heard from many people who were outraged by his situation and surprised that officials weren’t moving more quickly to rectify what seemed a unique injustice. I also heard from people who saw in his situation a reflection of their own. As they viewed it, an injustice had occurred, but it was not unique.
“The exact same thing happened to me,” one person wrote.
“I am also a physician who had a similar experience,” another person wrote.
“I too was stateless and faced with the same immigration nightmare,” wrote yet another.
People who were stateless described in their emails long, frustrating legal fights that cost them money they didn’t have. They talked about how their status had kept them from family members and forced them to limit their life choices. They spoke of their situations using words such as “let down” “punished” and “anguish.”
The details of their stories differed, but what each person seemed eager to convey was this: We exist.
More than 200,000 individuals who live in the U.S. are estimated to be stateless or at risk of becoming stateless. Yet it remains an issue we don’t often hear about. A major reason is that the people who are most affected by statelessness also have the most to lose by speaking out about it. They don’t carry the protections that come with having citizenship — of this country or any.
“It’s a very lonely experience to go through this,” Karina Ambartsoumian-Clough, the executive director of United Stateless, a grass-roots organization led by stateless people, told me recently. “It is a violation of these people’s human rights. Our human rights.”
Ambartsoumian-Clough said statelessness affects people who were born here, brought here and have sought refuge here. She has met people who are stateless because they came from countries that no longer exist, were born in countries that didn’t recognize them as citizens because of discriminatory practices (including nations that won’t acknowledge female children born to men who don’t claim them) and were born in the U.S. to diplomats or parents who didn’t register their births.
As she tells it, she became a “citizen of nowhere” when the country where she was born dissolved. She was a child when her parents left Soviet Ukraine and sought U.S. asylum, which they were later denied. She was a teenager when she realized she was not recognized as a citizen in this country or in Ukraine. She said her father died stateless, and her mother remains stateless.
Ambartsoumian-Clough and six other people founded United Stateless in hopes of creating a space where stateless people could come together as a community and find legal and other support. The website they created shows they recognized that the issue remained mostly unacknowledged and unaddressed, and that more people needed to hear from stateless individuals to understand what they were going through.
“As constituents, we have been silent, living in the shadows, unable to participate in elections, and often too afraid to share our stories,” reads a page on the organization’s website that lists its goals. “We are changing this NOW, for we DO have a human right — as defined in Article 15(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: ‘Everyone has the right to a nationality’.”
The organization has advocated for federal legislation that would offer stateless people more protection and a clearer path to citizenship. In 2022, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) introduced the Stateless Protection Act, which would have achieved that. The Maryland lawmakers are expected to reintroduce it this year.
Ambartsoumian-Clough is hoping to see that legislation advance. So, too, is Henry Pachnowski.
On the day we talk, Pachnowski apologizes several times for getting emotional. One of those moments comes as he describes the day he arrived in the U.S. with his mother. He says his Polish parents were forced by Nazis into a labor camp in Germany and his family later lived in a displaced persons camp. He was 11 when he arrived in New York.
“When we were coming over on the boat and we entered the port,” Pachnowski starts to say before pausing to fight back tears, “my mother hollered, ‘Look, there’s Madam Liberty.’”
Pachnowski says he never thought much about his immigration status, until he was in his 20s and a marijuana possession charge caused him to lose his green card. He says he would have been deported, but no country would claim him. Instead, he spent most of his life without the protection and benefits that come with that permanent U.S. residence status. He says he worked for decades as a plumber and an antiques dealer and was in his 60s when he realized he couldn’t collect Social Security.
It wasn’t until his 80s that he finally started to receive Social Security. He credits a professor and his students at the Immigrant Justice Clinic at American University with making that happen. He says they got the marijuana charge expunged from his record and helped him get his green card.
In 2022, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) also granted Pachnowski a pardon for a 1967 charge of lewd conduct as part of an initiative aimed at taking on historic homophobia in the justice system. Pachnowski had explained in his request for a pardon that he had “engaged with consensual intimacy with a male partner in a deserted industrial area in his car and was caught by a security guard who said we had gone against ‘God and nature.’”
Pachnowski mentions the pardon in a piece he wrote for the Washington Blade. The title: “U.S. should create path to citizenship for ‘stateless’ people like me.”
Pachnowski says he was embarrassed at first to speak publicly about the charge, but he realizes now that he is not alone.
“I struggled all my life,” he says. “And there are a lot of people like myself. I just feel more people need to know that.”
