Originally Posted by
ajax
There are approximately twelve million 'stateless' individuals around the world. A very good example are the children (and grandchildren) of Tibetan refugees in Nepal and India. They are not citizens and instead are given refugee passports and have refugee status. States with large refugee populations are very familiar with this concept. And it is screwed up, indeed.
Latvia and Estonia also have a large number of non-citizens - at one point as high as 1/3 of total population. They are former Soviet citizens mostly of Russian ethnicity who permanently resided in these republics (some were born there) at the time they announced independence from the USSR. These people were given non-citizen passports (not merely alien travel documents) and a special status - different from that of later alien permanent residents.