This is the first of a three-part investigation I co-reported and co-wrote with María Álvarez del Vayo, Ter Garcia, Carmen Torrecillas, and Adrián Maqueda of Civio with help from some EDJNet partners. Part 2, “Stranger in a native land” is here. Part 3, “People of no nation: how being stateless means living without rights” is here. The data visualizations are only visible at the Civio website. También hay una versión en español.

Magali Varela de Torres, who moved from Venezuela to Madrid, Spain, in 2017, is the only member of her nuclear family who is not yet Spanish. Her husband was Spanish and now her daughter, son and granddaughter are Spanish, too. Varela de Torres, a retired social worker who has official recognition of disability due to her Alzheimer’s, has lived in Spain long enough to apply for citizenship, too. But Spain’s Ministry of Justice has not processed her requests for a health exemption from the culture test required for naturalisation. Her daughter Adriana Torres has submitted three requests over the last three years and keeps getting the same robotic reply from the ministry asking for information she has already submitted. After listening to her daughter tell the story, Varela de Torres says, “It’s as if I don’t exist.”