Originally Posted by
CDTraveler
My brother's ex was officially stateless and traveled on a UN passport.
Her father left the U.S. with the U.S. Army when he was 17, stayed overseas in the country he was stationed in and never came to back to the U.S. after he was 18. The county where he settled granted citizenship through the father, but the U.S. did not give citizenship to his kids because he left the U.S. before he was 18. The family didn't know that until the kids were in their teens and tried to get passports. Turns out that there were ~100 kids of former U.S. GI's in the same situation (or at least ~100 who tried to get passports) and the UN ended up granting them special status of some sort because they were officially stateless.
There are way more than 100 foreign-born kids of US citizen fathers who have been born stateless and remained that way into adulthood and even death. And in the future the number of such persons born to a US parent seems likely to increase as now more US citizen mothers will also end up a biological parent of children stateless at birth due to the maternal US residence requirement having been increased (by the SCOTUS) to match the time period required of US citizen fathers. The SCOTUS could have reduced the parental US residence requirement for fathers so that it matches that for mothers as provided by Congress; but that would have been the kind of expansion of the US citizen base that they'd rather let Congress adjust.
I'd hazard an educated guess that globally the number of people with no recognized state citizenship at birth far exceeds the number of people with 5 (or more) citizenships by birth.