With characteristic foresight, Hannah Arendt recognized the fundamental human rights challenge of our age: supposedly "inalienable" rights are unenforceable for individuals who "lack ⋯ their own government." To "lack one's own government" is a status neither precise nor transparent. At a minimum, though, it includes the situation captured by the definition of statelessness in international law: a person is stateless if "not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law." 2 The international community has acknowledged Arendt's insight about the perils of this situation by enshrining and widely supporting three interrelated principles: the right to a nationality, 3 the right to a legal identity, 4 and the obligation to reduce child statelessness. 5 Yet, over half a century since Arendt wrote about the unenforceability of human rights, and despite the proliferation of human rights institutions, regional agreements, diasporic identities, and celebrations of global citizenship, child statelessness appears to be a growing problem. In 2006, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced that 5.8 million people were stateless. 6 Even though this figure is already more than double the number identified in any prior year, UNHCR emphasized that "the real total is believed to be nearer 15 million." 7 The disjuncture between the two figures is revealing. The first represents those who are technically stateless- people who do not have a nationality according to the international law definition cited above. But, those in the second group (nearly three times the size of the first according to UNHCR) also "lack their own government" in Arendt's sense: they are de facto or functionally stateless, unable to enforce rights that are supposedly inalienable. A peculiarly disenfranchised population that clearly illustrates this functional statelessness and its dire consequences is the subset of child migrants who lack their own government. I will call this population Arendt's children. This article explores their ambiguous position between inalienable and unenforceable rights. It inquires what it means-to invoke Arendt again-to assert that these migrant children, like all children, have a right to have rights. First, it discusses what statelessness means for children today and how legal and functional statelessness impinge on their lives. It enquires into the rights that children are entitled to as a matter of law and contrasts this with the enforcement capabilities of states in practice. It also examines the effect of treaty ratification on rights realization and investigates particular areas of relevant policies such as age determination and information gathering. The discussion then turns to the consequences of rights denial, including detention and expulsion, and the efficacy of litigation as a rights enforcement strategy. Migrant children's access to economic and social rights, particularly education and health care, is reviewed. Finally, the article investigates what is required to reduce the functional statelessness of migrant children, concluding with a discussion of whether Arendt's children can be considered citizens and the consequences of their compromised status.

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child health migratory population human rights international law