Unsettled Enough

Nitish Pahwa unravels the legal and familial complexities of statelessness in an essay from LARB Quarterly no. 46: “Alien.”

By Nitish PahwaOctober 4, 2025

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This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 46: Alien. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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IF WE’RE TALKING YEARS: I’m just as American arrogant as you, raised and educated and indoctrinated on the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabe and Lenape peoples. Though I’ve spent plenty of time in India, I never “lived” there, exactly, and I haven’t returned (is that the right word?) to Oman. If we’re talking paperwork: Oman didn’t have birthright citizenship in the 1990s, so I was naturalized into American citizenship alongside my parents, whose dual-citizen status with India also allowed them to finagle for me an Overseas Citizenship status. But I’m not a dual citizen myself, though I’m entitled to far more rights in India than the millions of others who do live there yet are disenfranchised thanks to caste, religion, class status, you name it. If we’re talking pigmentation: I suppose I can call you all my “fellow Americans,” but I never feel less like a fellow when I hear you all attempt to guess my—well, surely you’ll be careful not to ask my “race,” but whatever term you land on (“background,” “origin,” “thing”), you’ll inevitably carry some wild assumptions (Mexican? Arab? Egyptian?).

Still, I have to exercise some grace, as it’s not like I get my background/origin/thing either. The census has me down as a member of the Asian American and Pacific Islander population; I haven’t been to those islands, and let’s be honest, Brown people aren’t part of your default archetype of the “Asian American.” I am South Asian American, specifically Indian American, even though one of my grandmothers was born in Karachi, a city we now recognize as being part of Pakistan. And I’m about as Omani as I am “American Indian” or West Indian.

When I came to understand my hazy nationality, it was with a sense of bemusement. Now, however, it feels tenuous. Thirty years after the circumstances of my birth granted me a hazy nationality, both of the ostensible democracies that claim me have embarked on vindictive, sweeping campaigns to purge their citizenship rolls. In addition to disenfranchising myriad refugees and religious minorities, the Hindu-nationalist Indian government has revoked Overseas Citizenship rights from several of its most prominent critics in the diaspora. A new US government initiative to “prioritize” denaturalization of various citizens has landed as the Supreme Court allows the Trump administration to weaken the Constitution’s universal guarantee of birthright citizenship. Meanwhile, over the past 30 years, Oman has broadened many of its routes to citizenship.

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The globalized world is one of mass statelessness. That murky personal status, a sort of legally enforced homelessness, is perhaps the most consistent motif of the 21st-century world order. Consider the innocent Guantánamo Bay detainees unable to be returned to their “home” countries for fear of persecution; the Syrian refugees, resettled for years across the expanse from Turkey to North America, blamed for the ensuing geopolitical unrest, and told they should go back to the rubble now that Bashar al-Assad is finally out; the Venezuelans and Haitians offered “temporary” American protection on increasingly arbitrary timelines; the asylum seekers who fled to Australia, only to be imprisoned in facilities on neighboring island nations like Nauru and Papua New Guinea, with the Australian government denying any liability; the Libyans caught between territories claimed by bloodthirsty warlords on one end and a repressive government on the other; the people of sub-Saharan Africa, devastated by unending regional conflicts from Ethiopia to Eritrea, Sudan to South Sudan, the Congo to Somalia; the Hong Kongers, some of whom have lived long enough to see themselves transformed from British colonial subjects to semiautonomous citizens to official mainland Chinese subjects; and the Palestinians, forever imprisoned in the once-open air of Gaza, or driven by force from the land they once claimed in the West Bank.

Yes, many of these people do not meet the definition of “stateless,” prescribed in international legalese for “a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law.” But what do you call it when there is no real option—when a government suddenly rules that you should not reside within its borders but a return to the jurisdiction deemed to be your “home” is untenable? Jimmy Aldaoud, a Greek-born Catholic, had lived in Detroit since he was a baby and never been to the country of his family’s origin: Iraq, a place where his fellow Christians were deemed to be “close to extinction” thanks to rampant persecution and harassment. Yet he was deported back there in 2019, to a nation whose language he did not speak, and died of medical complications. Was he not made, in effect, stateless? Had he always been stateless, belonging to neither the United States nor Greece nor Iraq, merely waiting his time until one authority called him in?

A lifelong Texan who was born in Mexico to parents who fled gang violence in El Salvador—what is her state, if she can be deemed sufficiently non-American at any time? A transgender Cameroonian granted safe harbor in Delaware, only to be told years later that their US documents will not recognize them as nonbinary—where is it they “belong”? An Afghan who arrived in Sweden after the US invaded his country, but is unable to bring the rest of his family thanks to new government restrictions, then watches from afar as Taliban violence destroys their house—is that the life of someone you would consider to be enfranchised?

In general, the term “alien” is the opposite of “citizen,” but there’s no straight line between those classifications. In between, you may become a “national,” a green card or visa holder, a “foreign worker,” a religious ambassador, an asylee, an adoptee, a constituent of an “unincorporated territory.” All these statuses are tethered to their own labyrinths of rules and jargon. And ultimately, they boil down to individual perception. Citizenship, a government database, a special piece of paper—they may offer you legal options, but they cannot and will not shield you from discrimination and aggression from your fellow citizens moment by moment, or from a government that changes the rules on a whim. You may not be an alien, but you will feel, and be, alienated. Your skin tone, your facial hair, your gait, your wardrobe, your odor, your awkwardness, your proficiency in a foreign language—it will likely condemn you on the streets before it condemns you in the eyes of your leaders.

Statelessness may be as much a matter of everyday perception as it is one of bureaucracy. Think of the heightened prominence of the term “migrant,” lacking the prefix of specificity: not an inbound immigrant, not an outbound emigrant, just a migrant on the move, somewhere, for reasons. It doesn’t matter whether you’re fleeing typhoons in the Philippines, racist mistreatment in Brazil, or an incursion of Russian soldiers in Ukraine, as long as you can be shelved under the “migrant” file.

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One might think my fellow Indians would understand this better than anyone else, with their uncertain senses of place in the postwar order. The colonizers, having inflamed interreligious tensions, food insecurity, and land disputes, left the former British India behind to tear itself apart into India and Pakistan via mass migration and violence, even as the autonomy of states like Kashmir remained in limbo. The Bangladesh War of Independence spurred even more displacement just a couple of decades later. Asians who had worked and settled in other British-controlled territories like Uganda and Myanmar were expelled en masse after those nations gained independence and were subsequently overtaken by military despots. The Sikhs sought to carve a homeland out of Punjab. China continues to encroach upon the Himalayan border.

Yet, I suppose, trauma may also spur another instinctual response—one of sheer self-preservation. The Indians have been as harsh on their own as any Indophobic foreign government could be, delving into the fine nuances others cannot see or know. “Untouchable” Dalits and lower-caste populations. Religious minorities such as Muslims and Sikhs and Christians. Left-wingers who advocate against Hindu nationalism. Millions of Indians who speak hundreds of languages that are not Hindi. The people of Kashmir, who never consented to be perpetually divided by India and Pakistan as they are now, to be part of the most militarized region in the world, to lose the few autonomous rights they’d once enjoyed. All of them consistent victims of the “world’s largest democracy,” told time and again they will not, cannot, belong.

As an Overseas Citizen, I cannot vote or otherwise participate in the electoral process, but as a lighter-skinned Brown man who was raised by an upper-caste Hindu family, I may reasonably expect that I can stroll down the clogged streets of Bombay without fear of targeted harassment, or engage with the local economy without fear of spurious discrimination. (That is, as long as no one looks up the many anti-Modi pieces I’ve written for my day job.) I may not live in India, but I’m sure as hell treated much better than millions of others who do.

There’s one other line of persecution in India that’s been haunting me lately. Much of the world has long forgotten about the Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, ill-treated by the now-deposed hero of democracy Aung San Suu Kyi, then violently evicted from public life by the extremist Buddhist military junta. The Rohingya have sought refuge across South Asia, first in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, then into India and Pakistan. But Pakistan is far, and it’s also handling a post-Taliban influx of Afghan asylum seekers—a number likely to increase after the United States deports more Afghans. In Bangladesh, the refugee camps are overflowing, spurring officials to deflect other hopefuls at the border, perhaps toward Southeast Asia; the now-deposed government of Sheikh Hasina and the new leadership under Muhammad Yunus have insisted that the Rohingya cannot stay in Bangladesh forever, that they must go back at some point, that they can expect shelter and food in the camps but cannot take any jobs or healthcare from Bangladeshi citizens. But these camps are in crisis mode, thanks to sweeping international aid cuts and fearmongering from India about the supposed “radicalization” of the expelled, helpless Rohingya.

How else is India treating these Rohingya? In May, in the midst of its brief military clash with Pakistan, India “deported” a few dozen Rohingya. That’s too kind a word for what the officials did: they were reportedly pushed off an Indian Navy ship into the Andaman Sea, left only in life jackets to splash and float in waters that extend miles deep. India’s fight against Pakistan also became a fight against “illegal Muslim immigrants,” which led even certified refugees to be dumped off the land by force. Though many of these Rohingya were rescued by a kindly Burmese fisherman, they were reeled back into the very hostilities they’d intended to escape. “I would rather die than return to the horrors in Myanmar,” one of these refugees told The Straits Times, a Singaporean newspaper. “But if no one wants us—not Myanmar, not Bangladesh, not India—where will I go?” To be stateless is to be unwanted, by everyone, everywhere. The Indians once escorted out of Myanmar by gunpoint are returning the favor to another group of Burmese outcasts.

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What I mean to lay out here is that we have no choice in determining what makes us a citizen in one place and an alien in another. We do not choose where we’re born, how, or to whom; we do not choose the heritage that informs our name, our location, our faiths; we do not choose the political realities that greet us upon arrival. And certainly, no one ever chooses to be unrooted, to depend upon the kindness of strangers.

It’s a funny thing, timing. My younger sister, born in Michigan a few months before 9/11, is the only American citizen-by-birth in my family. Had I been born in India instead of Oman, I would have earned full birthright citizenship in the subcontinent; if I wished, now, to fully naturalize there, I would have to spend 12 years in the country and renounce my American citizenship. But further than that, to live comfortably, I might have to renounce my principles: my solidarity with religious minorities; my desire to welcome the displaced; my stated opposition to the prime minister and to any Indian leader who rules via domination, dog whistles, and fearmongering. It’s not unlikely that I could even lose my Overseas Citizenship for those very reasons. And one could fairly add that I’m describing where we’re at in the United States too.

For much of my life, I never considered the facts of my birth as anything other than a funny oddity, a complex situation that does not fit the succinct answers expected of the where-are-you-from query. But I can’t pretend that I haven’t pined for things to have been easier—that I’d been born stateside, not naturalized into it. Or that Oman had some path for those simply born there to retain some ties and guarantees. Or that, as an immigrant, I fit more of the stereotype others expect of me: a slight accent, wondrous childhood experiences abroad, a firsthand memory of the cross-continental pursuit of the American dream. At least something that made me feel more anchored in the views others have of me. I’m American arrogant, but I can never be as American arrogant as you. By that alone, I can never feel, or be, the American that the term “American” evokes.

But that’s all trifling. When I think on it now, I can’t help but realize how easily I may have ended up in a much less secure situation, rather than one that’s merely socially alienating and inconvenient at worst. Is there a timeline where my Hindu family members stayed in Karachi and found themselves persecuted for their faith? Or where they had been expelled from another former British colony where they’d spent their lives, leaving them without any sense of a real home? Or where we stayed in India, only for me to come study in the United States and be prosecuted for leading a campus protest? Or where I was born into a lower caste lineage, subjecting me to casteist discrimination from other Indian Americans? Or, frankly a most horrifying prospect, where I became the type of Hindu nationalist I now abhor?

I am not stateless, a fact for which I am grateful. But I am unsettled enough, bound only to the mercy of international laws, that I do not take my status for granted. And when I see the immigrants, asylum seekers, climate refugees, and pogrom survivors crowding foreign borders everywhere, desperate for pieces of paper that may offer them a chance for hope and survival, I can’t help but think about how the country that raised me is seeking to increase those numbers of dispossessed and shovel them off elsewhere, whether to be renditioned to a foreign gulag or dumped in a country they’ve never been to, one that may just so happen to have stoked nativist sentiments among its own population. The state of the world today is one of inescapable statelessness, both formal and perceived. Had things turned out just slightly differently for me, I might have been part of that myself. I know you don’t like to think about it, but you could have been too.

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Featured image: Bertha E. Jaques. Green Dragon, n.d. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Chicago Society of Etchers (1935.13.435). CC0, si.edu. Accessed September 30, 2025. Image has been cropped.