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Comment by evanelias | Hacker News Reader

Which is where, exactly, for the people in question? i.e. what is the legal home country for most Roma in Denmark? Given folks like DHH have such strong opinions about this, I would expect they should be able to detail the specifics of the mass deportation plan they're proposing!

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Presumably, if they are immigrants, then they have a passport and a legal home country. I agree with you that mass deportation (i.e. deportation of a whole group not based on individual guilt or innocence) is bad. Just saying that this particular argument isn't relevant.

Pardon my skepticism, but cursory web searching and LLM prompting is giving me responses like "a significant portion of the European Roma population faces high rates of statelessness or lacks basic civil documents", while citing real website articles with titles such as "Many Roma in Europe are stateless and live outside social protection".

That aligns 100% with things I've read previously, but that said, I'm not terribly well-informed on the topic and maybe I'm entirely wrong here. Do you have any links/info that support what you're saying?

Being literally stateless is not the same as not having a passport. (My father-in-law doesn't have one, but he's a perfectly respectable citizen!) Being in a foreign country without a passport is also not being stateless - it may well correspond to being an illegal immigrant, however.

It is quite hard to be made stateless. You have to be born in a very unlucky place.

All of this means that immigrants can be deported to their country of origin.

The articles I read yesterday indicated that it would be quite difficult to determine country of origin in many cases, due to complete lack of official identity documentation.

The article I previously mentioned by name literally describes statelessness and why that occurred for Roma in several specific scenarios: https://www.coe.int/en/web/commissioner/-/many-roma-in-europ...

So again I must ask, do you have any links that support what you're saying?

But somebody who comes into a country must know where they come from! So you can just ask them. If they refuse to say, then that seems like a them problem, no?

I don’t know what proportion of gypsies are literally stateless… though like you I can ask ChatGPT. So I did, and it gave lots of links and an answer of “well under 1%”: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a6d93888f208191a02d5e6edd0ceea9

Regardless of whether they are "truly" stateless, if they have no identity documentation -- which your AI answer repeatedly indicates is a situation applying to a larger number of Roma -- and they refuse to say where they're from (or they say they're from that country; or they name a country that isn't where they're from; or the named country refuses to take them) then once again, where are they being deported to exactly?

My point with all this is that it is VERY important to ask specific questions of the folks like DHH who are promoting mass deportation plans, because otherwise having public support for this kind of thing is exactly how you end up with people getting sent to concentration camps (or worse). They're demanding "just deport them!" while hand-waving away even the most basic details of what that might mean, and simultaneously making disturbing analogies to shooting wolves. It's not hard to connect the dots here.

As for "That seems like a them problem"... For a directly analogous situation currently happening in the world, consider all the people the US has blindly deported to the CECOT prison in El Salvador. Is that a "them problem" too, where a large number of undocumented Venezuelan migrants with tattoos are being sent to a concentration camp for gang members in an entirely different country?

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