Hundreds of thousands of Haitians have emigrated for years to the Dominican Republic for work [AFP/Getty Images]
By Al Jazeera International, July 22, 2015
Haitians have marched in Port-au-Prince in solidarity with the thousands of undocumented residents of Haitian descent who face deportation from the Dominican Republic.
Thousands of protesters demanded on Tuesday that the Haitian government ban the import of goods from the neighbouring country. The demonstrators presented the relevant petition to Evans Paul, Haiti's prime minister.
Many protesters wore T-shirts calling for migrants to be respected as they made their way through the capital under police escort.
Jean Robert Argand, from the Collective of December 4, a civil society group, called on Haitians to back local products that support citizens and build their economy.
"We urge the Dominican Republic government to respect the rights of Haitians and their dignity. Also, we ask that they start to support our local products," he said.
The protests came after the application of a 2013 court ruling in the Dominican Republic that denied children of Haitian migrants their birth certificates, identity documents, and stripped them of their nationality, Amnesty International and the UN say.
While the Dominican government says the legal changes aim to tackle illegal migration from Haiti, human rights groups say the move is rooted in long-standing racism and xenophobia in the Dominican Republic towards darker-skinned Haitians.
Activists estimate that up to 200,000 people are in legal limbo and stateless - not recognised as a citizen by Haiti or the Dominican Republic.
Hundreds of thousands of Haitians have emigrated for years to the Dominican Republic for work.
Last month, Haiti's prime minister said the influx of Haitians returning from the Dominican Republic was causing a humanitarian crisis.
But authorities in the Dominican Republic have downplayed concerns, saying those in the country can sign up for a regularisation process for undocumented migrants.
The Dominican government set up a registration programme that would grant two-year temporary migrant status to those who could meet requirements.
It says more than 210,000 people have registered under the programme.
Dominicans Slam Government Hypocrisy as OAS Mission Concludes
As tens of thousands of Haitian descendents face deportation from the Dominican Republic, delegates from the Organization of American States looking into the regularization plan forcing massive out-migration wrapped up their two-day mission in the capital Santo Domingo Saturday, Prensa Latina reported. OAS delegation chief Francisco Guerrero indicated that the OAS should maintain contact with Dominican civil society organizations that attended meetings in the capital, including human rights, women’s, and Haitian-Dominican organizations. Guerrero also said a report on the OAS findings will be released after the mission.
OAS delegates will visit the Dominican-Haitian border after concluding business in the capital. The delegation comes as a Dominican organization slammed the Dominican government, its traditional political class, andits business elite for exploiting the issue of migration in order to scapegoat Haitian workers as responsible for the country’s problems. “The real enemy of our people is this system that keeps them in poverty,” said Juan Miguel Perez of the Dominican organization known as Camina DR, adding that the dominant economic model, corruption, impunity, and policies that favor private interests benefit a small minority at the suffering of many.
“We accuse the Dominican business class of maintaining permanent hypocrisy regarding the reality of immigrant workers, paying them, just like Dominican workers, miserable salaries,” said Perez. Perez’ organization condemned the long-standing anti-immigration, racist, and xenophobic policies of the government that criminalize poor migrants and called on Dominican society to create a common front against what they say is a “ruling regime of repression, abuse, and inequality for the poor,” regardless of nationality.
Dominican Republic is home to about half a million stateless Haitians, stripped of Dominican citizenship in a 2013 court decision that retroactively denied citizenship to the children of undocumented migrants dating back to 1929. A government-imposed deadline for undocumented people to register with Dominican immigration authorities that came down last month set a time limit on Haitians' stay in the Dominican Republic. With few permits granted, the regularization plan was essentially a mass-deportation order for Haitians and many Dominicans of Haitian descent. Less than 2 percent of Haitian immigrants have been granted Dominican citizenship rights through the regularization program, according to a report by U.S. News. Some 40,000 Haitians have already been pushed out of the Dominican Republic, though the government insists they have left voluntarily.
While the immediate root of the current crisis is the 2013 citizenship stripping that instantly pushed hundreds of thousands of Haitian-Dominicans into a precarious statelessness, the underlying tensions between the neighboring countries on the shared Caribbean island of Hispaniola run much deeper. Under the Dominican dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in 1937, thousands of Haitians were massacred in a government-sponsored mass killing of the Haitian community. Even some dark-skinned Dominicans were targeted in the anti-Haitian ethnic purge known as the Parsley Massacre. As close neighbors, the Dominican Republic and Haiti share a similar history of colonization, occupation, and U.S. domination. Since as far back as the late 1800s, hundreds of thousands of Haitians have crossed the border fleeing violence and poverty to seek a better life in the Dominican Republic.