Liew’s father’s experience “fueled and inspired” her research into stateless people
Jamie Chai Yun Liew has been immersed in the world of immigration, refugees, citizenship law, and more specifically, stateless people, since a young age. Liew grew up with a stateless father, meaning that he did not have the nationality of any country.
Liew has redefined a subset of these people — in situ stateless people, defined as “persons who live in a country they consider their own but which does not recognize them as citizens” — as Ghost Citizens, in a book published this past February.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) counts 4.4 million people as stateless worldwide, a figure many estimate to be much higher. “It’s kind of a misunderstood problem,” Liew told the Fulcrum.
“A lot of people think stateless people are migrants or foreigners, but there are a lot of stateless people who are within the countries of their birth, countries where they have deep connections, and family ties, and other links, so it is quite a big problem, and one that’s not being attended to, I would say, very well.”
Liew noted that some stateless people are oppressed or experiencing genocide, such as the Rohingya in Myanmar, Palestinians from the occupied territories, and Tibetans in China, but that there are stateless people who don’t face those issues and are “struggling nonetheless,” noting the large population of stateless people in Malaysia. “My research focuses on [the second] subset of people,” says Liew.
Liew graduated from the University of Ottawa’s law school in and was called to the Ontario bar in 2006, opening her own practice the following year. She has appeared at the Supreme Court of Canada five times as an intervener (a third party permitted by the court to make arguments in a case), has had her work cited by the Supreme Court of Canada, and has appeared before many other federal courts.
Liew is currently a full professor at the U of O’s law school, where she teaches multiple courses on immigration and refugee law, among others. Her debut novel Dandelion, also revolving around the theme of statelessness, was published in 2022.
Liew said that writing the non-fiction Ghost Citizens was very different from writing the fictional Dandelion, but that the process of writing the two books overlapped. “I wrote them around the same time,” said Liew.
“I kind of borrowed techniques of writing fiction [when] writing Ghost Citizens in that the book is somewhat narrative. It depicts stories from stateless people, from my own family history, but I grounded it in the research, and in what many students right now are learning, which is to convert data that they find in the field into an accessible, readable story.”
Liew acknowledged her father’s experience “fueled and inspired” her research into stateless people. “I knew that this happened — because of my father’s own history — but I didn’t realize how common it was and how unknown it was until I was working and researching on immigration law.”
The experiences and clients’ repeated issues that Liew has witnessed over the past two decades led her to look at stateless people through a more systemic lens. “I think one of the most interesting parts about [Dandelion and Ghost Citizens] is while it was written in a succinct period of time, my thinking around these issues have developed over the last decade.”
Liew agreed that her experience as a student at the U of O played a role in her return as a professor years later — as she kept in touch with some of her mentors and professors — while noting that she had always thought she would practice law for the rest of her life. “When you’re practicing and you see the same problems hit your desk over and over again, you want to think about them more deeply, and see if you can contribute to a policy angle,” said Liew.
“I think the University of Ottawa has a really rich community of professors and students who are interested in issues of migration, and immigration, and statelessness, and I would encourage students — even if they never thought they’d be interested — to explore and take a course in that, and you never know where it will take you.”
Ghost Citizens is now available, including autographed copies which can be purchased online from Perfect Books in Ottawa.
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