Last June in the Dominican Republic, an estimated 200,000 people of Haitian descent became illegal residents when a deadline passed for them to apply for DR citizenship.
Since then, at least 14,000 people have been deported by the DR government, which claims that another 70,000 left “voluntarily,” according to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
The thousands of Haitian DR residents who were declared illegal last June, as well as the ensuing deportations, are due to legislative steps taken by the DR government to curb what officials there see as an illegal-immigration problem.
“The Dominican Republic is a poor country with few resources, full of misery and problems of its own,” said DR legislator Vinicio Castillo, according to the Pulitzer Center. “If we forbid deportations and we keep the border open, what will happen? All of Haiti will come here.”
New laws
The first legislative step was taken in 2004, when the country enacted a law that excludes children born to undocumented immigrants from receiving citizenship, according to the Open Society Foundations, a United States-based non-profit organisation that claims to defend human rights.
A 2013 decision by the country’s Constitutional Court not only upheld the law, but also applied it retroactively to 1929.
After the decision that year, the DR government passed a naturalisation law that allowed people who were born in the country but had never obtained citizenship documents to eventually become citizens. Those people had until June 18 of last year to apply for the status.
But the Huffington Post reported last February that fewer than 9,000 of the estimated 200,000 undocumented Dominican-born people had successfully completed the application process to become naturalised, and as of last August the government had not provided an updated figure of how many completed that process, according to Human Rights Watch.
‘Humanitarian crisis’
The situation has now turned into what some describe as a “humanitarian crisis,” due to reports of families being split up, people being shepherded into Haitian refugee camps, and people being targeted by the authorities for their skin colour, as Haitians in the DR are predominantly black.
The Pulitzer Center documented the stories of some of the refugees, chronicling their efforts to assimilate in Haiti, where some of them had never set foot before being deported.
One of them was 7-year-old Kimberly Charles-Antoine, who was deported last year along with her mother.
“Kimberly and her mother now live in a refugee camp in Haiti known as Fond Bayard, without clean water or sanitation,” the Pulitzer Center reported last month. “Advocacy groups say the conditions in such camps constitute a humanitarian emergency. Haitian officials said last year that an estimated 2,000 people had settled in the camps; by now, the number is believed to be far higher.”
Haiti, with the help of international human rights groups and a $2 million allocation from the United Nations’ emergency funds, is attempting to find stable homes for the refugees, according to the Seattle Times.
Int’l response
Meanwhile, the international community’s response to the crisis has been described as largely apathetic.
“The international community has largely shrugged — as have regional organisations in the Americas,” Foreign Policy in Focus commented last week. “The US-dominated Organization of American States, for example, sent a delegation to Santo Domingo for just two days last July. It’s unlikely to take further action, despite appeals from Haiti for international support.”
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