3206 Ronan Lee International Journal of Communication 13(2019) claim repeated frequently during my research in the Rohingya communities in Myanmar and Bangladesh and among the Rohingya’s diaspora. These assertions about the group’s history are important because Myanmar’s constitution and citizenship law provide collective citizenship rights for groups present in the country before the start of the British colonial period in 1823 (Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma, 1982; Republic of the Union of Myanmar, 2008). While the Rohingya are today denied citizenship rights in Myanmar, there is evidence that the community was treated as citizens by the Burmese authorities during the decade and a half following independence in 1948, but the Rohingya’s rights were eroded throughout the country’s decades of militaryled rule after a 1962 military coup (Berlie, 2008; Yegar, 1972). Throughout the democratic period before the 1962 coup, the Rohingya had political rights, could vote in elections (a right they would maintain until the Rohingya’s disenfranchisement by President Thein Sein’s government before the 2015 national election), and had elected members in Burmese Parliament, including government ministers and parliamentary secretaries (Berlie, 2008; Yegar, 1972). Burma’s first postindependence prime minister, U Nu, told a 1954 radio audience: The people living in Maungdaw and Buthidaung regions are our nationals, our brethren. They are called Rohingyas. They are one of the same par in status of nationality with Kachin, Kyah, Karen, Mon, Rakhine and Shan. They are one of the ethnic races of Burma. (Haque, 2017, p. 466) In the year immediately preceding the 1962 coup, the Rohingya language was broadcast by the Burma Broadcasting Service’s radio station, but the Rohingya’s situation changed considerably following this coup. Since then, Burma/Myanmar’s authorities have increasingly restricted the Rohingya’s rights and denied their citizenship claims, often describing the Rohingya as temporary residents and regularly treating them as illegal migrants (HRW, 2014; Radio Free Asia, 2012). Consequently, rights restrictions impair virtually every aspect of the Rohingya’s lives. Denied citizenship rights, they are routinely subject to travel restrictions (often including limits on their ability to travel even to adjacent villages), limits on their access to education and healthcare, and limits on their ability to marry and have children (Amnesty International, 2017; Berlie, 2008; HRW, 2012, 2013). By 2018, the Rohingya represented one of the world’s largest stateless populations (Ibrahim, 2018). Rights restrictions and intermittent local communal violence between Rakhine State’s Buddhist majority and the Rohingya Muslims, as well as poverty, have contributed to a near constant flow of Rohingya refugees out of Myanmar since independence (Lee, 2014; Lewa, 2001). Planned migration is often by boat through the Bay of Bengal, and the desperate situation of Rohingya refugees adrift and unwanted there during 2015 brought some international attention. In response to the U.S. downgrading Thailand’s standing in the annual Trafficking in Persons Report 2014, the Thai Navy prevented Rohingya refugees arriving by boat from landing in Thailand, an approach subsequently adopted by the Malaysian authorities, which led to a standoff that lasted weeks. This was only resolved when the Malaysian, Indonesian, Thai, Filipino, and U.S. governments agreed to adopt a humanitarian approach to allow those already at sea to safely land (Hoffstaedter, 2015; U.S. Department of State, 2014; Wolf, 2015). Rohingya members I spoke with in Rakhine State during 2015, 2016, and 2017 told me that since the 2015 Bay of Bengal migration crisis,