This woman was born in Haiti, but her eight children were born in the Dominican Republic. Tens of thousands of people of Haitian descent born in the DR have had their Dominican citizenship revoked, rendering them stateless and facing deportation. Photo: UNHCR/B. Sokol
Haitian workers facing deportation by Dominican neighbors
By Azam Ahmed, New York Times, June 16, 2015
Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers are facing deportation from the Dominican Republic, the latest in a series of actions by the government that have cast a light on the country’s long-troubled relationship with its Haitian neighbors.
Undocumented workers in the Dominican Republic had until Wednesday to register their presence in the country, in the hope of being allowed to stay.
The government says nearly 240,000 migrant workers born outside the Dominican Republic have started the registration process. But there are an estimated 524,000 foreign-born migrant workers in the country — about 90 percent of whom are Haitian, according to a 2012 survey — leaving a huge population of migrants at risk of deportation.
Dominican Republic Passes Law for Migrants’ ChildrenMAY 22, 2014 Human rights groups had hoped the government would delay the registration deadline, given the difficulties faced by many in producing documents and satisfying bureaucratic requirements. But there were no indications that the authorities would stall their plan to begin ejecting workers.
Migrant workers in the Dominican Republic had to register by Wednesday in order to stay. Credit Orlando Barria/European Pressphoto Agency “The signals are clear,” said Beneco Enecia, the director of Cedeso, a nonprofit group that works with migrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent. “The Dominican government is setting up logistics, placing vehicles and personnel to start the process of repatriation.”
Haitian workers, who have crossed the border for generations to cut sugar cane, clean homes and babysit, have long experienced an uneasy coexistence with their wealthier Dominican neighbors. It is a relationship fraught with resentment, racial tension and the long shadow of the massacre of tens of thousands of Haitian laborers ordered by the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1937.
Dominican officials have long said they have borne the brunt of Haiti’s economic troubles, both before and after the 2010 earthquake that devastated their neighbor and sent a stream of people fleeing across the border.
The tensions peaked in 2013 when a constitutional court moved to strip the citizenship of children born to Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic as far back as 1929. Many of the people affected by the ruling had lived their whole lives in the Dominican Republic and knew nothing of Haiti, not even the language.
An international outcry prompted the government to soften its stance somewhat with a law the next year. It promised citizenship to children whose births were in the nation’s civil registry, and a chance at nationalization for those not formally registered.
Advocates and international legal bodies said it still fell short. Anything less than full citizenship left these people stateless, belonging neither to their birthplace nor to their family’s homeland, they argued. But that group does not appear to be the target of the deportations, at least not directly.
Andrés Navarro García, the Dominican minister of foreign relations, told reporters on a trip to Spain that a majority of those subject to deportation had already started the registration process and would not be deported.
For those who do not enter the process, Mr. Navarro said, there will be no mass roundups to deport people. Instead, the government will handle cases individually and work in conjunction with the Haitian government for an orderly transfer of citizens.
Responding to questions from other regional leaders, however, Mr. Navarro asserted the position his government has taken in the past: that the Dominican Republic, as a sovereign nation, has the right to determine its own immigration policy without the interference of other states.
The migrant workers who have registered so far have been granted a 45-day grace period during which they can complete the process. Migrants are expected to produce signed work permits from employers, who can be reluctant to provide such documentation.
The deportations, which could begin in the coming days, have generated a more muted response from other countries than the uproar stirred by the 2013 court ruling, which essentially ordered the mass denationalization of as many as 200,000 Dominican-born children. One reason for the relative diplomatic silence, including from the United States, is the troubled relationship many countries have with migrant workers who enter their borders illegally seeking employment, advocates argued.
“Migrant deportation is something states don’t want to get into because they themselves want to continue to do such deportations,” said Liliana Gamboa, who coordinates an anti-discrimination project for the Open Society Foundations in the Dominican Republic. “I don’t know how much pushback there can be from other states.”
Still, to the extent that deportations occur on a large scale, there is a fear that they will ensnare people who are trying to comply with the law — whether they are children born in the Dominican Republic to migrant workers, or migrant workers who are trying to satisfy the paperwork requirements.
Some advocates worry that the mechanism to identify potential deportees will be to target any dark-skinned people suspected of being of Haitian descent, whether they have papers or not.
“There are no adequate screening mechanisms,” said Angelita K. Baeyens, the programs director at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.
Efforts to process children born in the Dominican Republic whose parents never formally registered them have fallen short. Fewer than 9,000 of an estimated population of tens of thousands have registered themselves as foreigners, as required by the law, a process that in theory puts them on a path to naturalization.
The status of these children is unclear, potentially leaving them vulnerable to deportation as well.
“If these massive deportations occur, will they include by mistake people who were born in the Dominican Republic?” Ms. Gamboa asked. “Will they follow the standards of international law? Will Haiti be able to receive this number of deportees? And what would their status be in Haiti?”
Others have raised questions about the impact on the Dominican economy. For generations, Haitians have assumed the jobs that many Dominicans do not want, filling a vital part of the labor market, often at below-market rates. Production costs could rise, some experts say, if a large chunk of the labor force is removed.
But that remains a distant threat. For now, activists like Mr. Enecia of Cedeso say many are resigned to their deportation.
“The criteria is based on racial discrimination,” he said. “Fear, desperation and anguish are the expressions of the people. They feel helpless.”
Paulina Villegas contributed reporting.
New York Dominicans protest Haitian deportations
By Vania Andre, Haitian Times, June 19, 2015
New York’s Dominican community came out in a show of solidarity on Wednesday to protest the planned deportations of tens of thousands of Dominico-Haitians from the Dominican Republic.
On June 17, New Yorkers of Dominican descent protested outside of the Dominican consulate near Times Square, to show their stance against the country’s controversial immigration policy, which could render thousands of Dominico-Haitians stateless. The organizers of the protest planned the demonstration as part of a larger anti-racism push in the Dominican Republic.
“I’m here, standing in solidarity with Dominicans of Haitian descent who are set to be deported in the hundreds of thousands,” Emmanuel Pardilla, one of the protesters, said. “There isn’t a government in the world that’s denationalizing a group of people, and there isn’t a single international body that’s doing something about it.”
In 2013, a Dominican court ruled to retroactively change the criteria needed to obtain nationality for those born to immigrant parents after 1929. Once international pressure set in, the Dominican government passed a new law in May 2014 that extended citizenship to Dominicans of Haitians descent, who were able to provide proof of their Dominican nationality.
On June 16 the registration process to provide proof and apply for legal status in the Dominican Republic ended.
New York City’s elected officials and leaders have come out in defense of the Dominico-Haitians.
“I call on the Dominican government to respect basic rights guaranteed to all people, including Dominicans of Haitian descent, under international law,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement.
People of Haitian descent born in the Dominican Republic are being “unjustly stripped of their nationality and legal status, just because of their heritage.”
There are roughly 600,000 Haitians living in the U.S., with the vast majority in New York and Florida.
“I believe that Haitians constitute one of the largest ethnic groups in New York State,” Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte said during an event hosted by the Brooklyn Historical Society last month. Bichotte is the first Haitian American from the city elected to the NYS Assembly.
In May, the New York State Assembly passed a resolution, introduced by Bichotte, condemning the denationalization of Dominico-Haitians.
This vote “sends an unequivocal message that the Dominican Republic’s persistent abuse of Dominicans of Haitian descent must stop,” Bichotte said after the resolution was adopted.
Ethnic tensions between Dominicans and Haitians have existed for decades on the island both groups call home. Racial strains came to an all-time high during the 1937 Parsley Massacre, when thousands of Haitians were slaughtered by Dominican troops at the order of Dominican president Rafael Trujillo.
“Our cultures are different but similar in so many ways,” one of the protesters said. “We are brothers and sisters in one island, both colonized people who have liberated ourselves from [colonialism]. We need to build on that.”
A petition urging the Obama administration to pressure the Dominican government to halt the deportations has garnered nearly 35,000 signatures.
CLICK HERE to sign the petition.
UN agency urges Dominican Republic to refrain deporting stateless people
By UN News Centre. June 19, 2015
The Dominican Republic must ensure that people whose citizenship was thrown into question by a 2013 ruling of the Constitutional Court will not be deported, the UN refugee agency said today.
“The Court’s ruling and the subsequent regularization plan which gave individuals born in the Dominican Republic until mid-June to regularize their status, impacts tens of thousands of people”, explained an Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spokesperson, Adrian Edwards, during a press conference in Geneva. “Most of them were born in the Dominican Republic and are of Haitian descent,” he added.
“With a stateless population in the Dominican Republic estimated at more than 200,000 people, the consequences of expulsion could be devastating,” he warned.
UNHCR is concerned about the human rights considerations for people who may be expelled and end up being pushed into Haiti, even though they are not considered as citizens of that country. “This would have serious repercussions for all who are affected and be a serious setback to efforts worldwide to end the problem of statelessness.”
It is of the utmost importance, Mr. Edwards emphasized, that the Dominican Republic takes necessary action to prevent any expulsions of stateless Dominicans and to avoid creating a new refugee situation. In this regard, UNHCR has offered its support to the Dominican authorities to identify and register these individuals.
While the Dominican authorities have announced that they will conduct screenings of all individuals subject to deportation, UNHCR has recommended that for people who claim to be Dominican but do not have the required documents, the authorities can use other screening approaches, such as knowledge of Spanish – “in order to allow a reasonable determination of whether people are likely to have been born and lived all their lives in the Dominican Republic,” the spokesperson added.