Access to citizenship for abandoned children: how migrants’ children become ‘stateless’ in Japanese orphanages

Abstract

There is a gap between the legal definition of abandoned children and the ambiguous condition of migrants’ abandoned children. Building on the theoretical frameworks of Mahdavi’s ‘legal production of illegality’, and Gonzales’s ‘the law and the clock’, this article highlights the importance of time as a factor for the legal production of statelessness. The cases of abandoned children of Southeast Asian parentage growing up in Japanese orphanages are analysed through interviews with staff members and a survey in orphanages in Japan. Two concepts are essential to analyse the role of time in the legal production of statelessness: 1) presumptive foreign nationality (attached by a local government without any confirmation from the home country), and 2) considered nationality (officials’ personal opinion on whether people qualify to acquire nationality). The ambiguous abandonment of migrants’ children pushes them into a limbo of nationality laws and results in their statelessness once they become adults.