.... As stateless people are not recognised by any country, they are invisible unless there is a system to identify them. (This was achieved through the 1961 UN Convention.) But most of these people continue to live outside society, with no right to education, schooling or healthcare.
Several countries in Asia and the Gulf region have recently made significant political and legislative progress over this, but Nepal has done something amazing. In November 2006 it voted for a citizenship law which enabled 2.6 million stateless people (out of 3.4 million) to obtain Nepalese nationality in 2007. Thailand is also beginning to naturalise a population whose numbers it cannot calculate but officially estimates at between 800,000 and 2 million people.
In Europe the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 made hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens stateless. In Lithuania 600,000 Russians were refused nationality at the beginning of this decade and 400,000 remain stateless. Memos in the archives testify to the “fairly direct style” used by Lithuania in its dealings with the UNHCR at the end of the 1990s, when its government refused to allow the UNHCR to classify people it referred to as non-citizens as being stateless.
The plantations of the Dominican Republic and Sri Lanka are worked by a visible labour force without nationality. Haitians, who have long lived on the Dominican Republic’s sugar cane plantations, and Indians (Tamils) on Sri Lanka’s tea plantations, number several hundred thousand. The Dominican government refuses nationality to the children of stateless parents, although this has been condemned by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and citizenship based on birthright prevails in Latin American legislation ...
http://mondediplo.com/2008/04/13citizens
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