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The Dominican government has effectively barred Haitian migrants and their Dominican-born descendants from attending school, owning property and working — by denying them the precious right to a legal identity. Their future depends on the government's willingness to adhere to a recent international court ruling.
By Michelle Garcia
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Esmilin Matos and son Youri, Dominicans of
Haitian descendent, live in Batey 5 in the south-western province of Barahona and work in the sugar-cane plantations. © AI |
In the heyday of the Dominican Republic's sugar economy, cane cutters clung to the bottom rung of society, poorly paid and confined to migrant labor camps (bateyes) that always lacked the essentials — proper housing, access to healthcare and schools.
Now that sugar no longer fuels the nation's economic engine, all that remains in the bateyes are crying babies, bored and uneducated mothers and unemployed men lounging on the side of the road near grazing horses. They are the families of field workers once trucked across the border from Haiti to the Dominican Republic to care for the thin reeds of sweetness. And in the last decade they lost one last precious thread of humanity: their right to a legal name, a place in society.
Dimari José chats with young mothers inside a blue clapboard casita, one of seven evangelical churches in the bateye. José, a robust woman with a heavy laugh, cradles her 11-month-old baby, swaddled in a white blanket, as they wait out a torrential storm. Even though these mothers were born in the Dominican Republic, the government considers them to be ineligible for citizenship — and thus here illegally — because they are the descendants of Haitian migrant workers.
José's tiny bundle, Josefa, like all the other little ones inside the church, is also ineligible for Dominican citizenship because José lacks the national identification card required to declare the birth of her baby, the first step to a birth certificate.
Without a birth certificate, a child in the Dominican Republic cannot advance beyond the seventh grade or move about freely without fear of deportation. The babies will become adults like their mothers, fearful of leaving the bateye and ineligible for a legal job.
The Dominican Constitution grants citizenship to people born in the country, but the government maintains that even Dominican-born Haitians are ineligible for citizenship. Officials insist that guest workers were never meant to remain in the country. They are considered "in transit."
"Even in hospital they don't give you the paper that you could use to declare [your child] because the first thing they ask for is, 'Where is your cédula [identification card],'" said José.
José's Haitian roots begin with her father, Wilson Noel, a trim man with a round face and hands made thick from years in the fields. In Creole-accented Spanish, he explains that some 30 years ago he answered the call for cane cutters and left the Haitian side of Hispaniola, the island Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic. Noel earned his wage with a machete, working for a state-owned sugar mill that gave him a ficha (a worker's identity card). With their fichas Haitian couples recorded their marriages, declared their children's births and sent them to school.
When José was born in the Dominican Republic, her birth certificate specified that she was declared con ficha (with ficha) — indicating that her parents were not citizens but guest workers.
This two-tiered system began to unravel a little over a decade ago, when the government privatized the sugar industry in an effort to increase foreign investment and unload poorly performing state mills. Without cane to cut, the Haitian migrants were no longer needed, and the fichas that laborers like Noel used to obtain birth certificates for their children became useless. Those who had secured national identification cards could move around, but the rest became illegal immigrants and vulnerable to deportation.
"How can you go far if you don't have your documents?" asked Noel, who established the church in the blue casita seven years ago. "That's why we pray for God to send someone to help us — because we don't have power, because we can't leave."
An estimated 280,000 ethnic Haitians in the Dominican Republic lack any form of identification, according to a report by the United States Agency for International Development. The predicament faced by the descendants of guest workers is part of a highly charged debate underway within nations struggling to balance the demand for foreign labor with a desire to limit who can become a citizen. At stake in this debate are the futures of some 190 million people worldwide who have sought work in foreign countries during the era of rapid economic globalization.
But the Dominican Republic's privatization efforts sent Haitian villagers into the cities in search of work. The capital, Santo Domingo, also became a destination for Haitians who fled their country in the years after the Haitian military deposed Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the democratically elected former president, in 1991.
The women took work in the homes of Dominicans as nannies and maids. The men have found work on construction sites building homes and on public works projects, such as the new elevated train system that cuts through Máximo Gómez Street, a main thoroughfare. They also line the streets selling cane, candy and coconut water. And with the increased visibility has come a backlash.
Government officials and the media pinned violence, social problems and poverty on the newcomers. And when the economy sagged and inflation skyrocketed, Creole-speaking Haitians became the target of Dominican frustration.
The government cracked down on the "Haitian invasion," as officials called it, by creating obstacles to obtaining birth certificates and national identification cards. An immigration law passed in 2004 — and later upheld by the Dominican Republic's Supreme Court — denies citizenship to children of Haitian migrants by forcing their parents to fulfill a considerable number of nearly impossible requirements. Ethnic Haitians found they could not obtain the paperwork that gave them voice, rights and visibility in the country.
"What the Dominican Republic has done is created a permanent underclass — a category of individuals that, in the eyes of the law, don't exist, have no right to own property, to an education, to health care, the right to vote," said Roxanna Altholz, a clinical lecturer of international law at the Boalt School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. "They are individuals caught in a legal limbo and condemned to poverty."
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A Haitian sugar cane worker in the Dominican
Republic overseen by a supervisor. © Stanley Green/AI |
Eight years ago the mothers of two little girls from one of the bateyes decided to fight back, and their case is forcing the nation to deliberate the economic, social and cultural rights of Haitian-Dominicans.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case Yean and Bosico v. Dominican Republic challenged the Dominican system before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, arguing that the two-tiered system denied the children the right to a legal name, identity and education.
The Dominican government maintained that children inherit their parents' citizenship status. "If the parents are undocumented, the child that is born is also undocumented," says Franklin Almeyda, secretary for interior security and police. He says the children are Haitians at birth because Haiti grants citizenship to people of Haitian descent regardless of where they are born.
In September 2005 the Inter-American Court rejected the Dominican government's argument that immigration status is inherited and ruled that the girls were entitled to Dominican nationality. "It is unacceptable to categorize people who live in a country for 10 or 15 years as transients," the court said. The court ordered the Dominican government to issue an apology, give birth certificates to the girls and revamp the system of issuing birth certificates and identity cards to make the process "reasonable and simple."
The government plans to present immigration reforms in December and has promised to fulfill the court's ruling. But among the proposals under consideration by the government are plans that would establish and codify a two-tier system of citizenship.
"We have to register the birth ... but not give the nationality," said Almeyda. "To give [Haitians] nationality, that's a matter of sovereignty, but a registration is a human right and that's under consideration right now."
At the heart of the debate is the balance between national sovereignty and a country's obligations under international laws and treaties. Inherent in the principle of national sovereignty is the right to regulate how people cross borders and who stays, but advocates are working feverishly to lobby for international human rights standards in an era of economic globalization that includes mass migration.
"It's an attempt to control humanity if you bring people within your borders," said David Baluarte, an attorney for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Justice and International Law. "You have large landowners or corporations or countries — these people have a labor need they want to fill. But there's a baseline with how these people need to be treated. There's the rub."
The point of contact is national sovereignty. John Fonte, a fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, argues that human rights activists are advocating for an international law that trumps national constitutions and threatens self-determination. "Who is to be a citizen is ultimately a question of self-government," said Fonte. "You have states that are self-governing that are being challenged by international law. You have international law redefining transnational law."
A child of migrant workers has the right to a name, to registration of birth and to a nationality, as well as the right to an education, according to the United Nations International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families, adopted by the General Assembly in 1990. But the international convention, which the Dominican government has not signed or ratified, allows states to retain control over who becomes a citizen.
In reality, however, the principled debate about human rights and national sovereignty is far removed from the long and bloody history of Dominican-Haitian relations. In a country where analyzing history and debating politics are considered national sports, Dominicans can become very prickly at the suggestion of foreign influence. The United States invaded three times. The nation was once the possession of Spain — and later its neighbor, Haiti.
Dominicans harbor fears of a "Haitian invasion" much the same way some Americans warn of a Mexican invasion in the Southwest. And like the United States, which carried out mass deportations of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the early 20th century, the Dominican Republic has periodically expelled Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans.
Politicians on the island have regularly stoked nationalistic and anti-Haitian sentiment in times of economic woes or as a strategy to consolidate political power. In 1937 former dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the massacre of some 20,000 Haitians. His protégé Joaquín Baláguer, who ruled the country for decades, responded to a sinking economy and complaints about the mistreatment of Haitian migrants by driving thousands of Haitians out of the country in the mid-1990s.
In the last 10 years the government has expelled tens of thousands of Haitians and dark-skinned Dominicans thought to be ethnically Haitian, rounding them up from the bateyes and on the streets. Government officials quoted in a 2002 Human Rights Watch report said they could easily spot undocumented Haitians because of their "rougher" and "blacker" skin.
Anti-Haitian sentiment, or antihaitianismo, was born from colonialism and slavery. The island of Hispaniola was partitioned by French colonialists, who ruled over their slaves in Haiti, and Spanish conquistadors, who commingled with their African slaves and had children called mulatos (a term for mixed race people that is not considered by Dominicans to be derogatory). From its inception, the colonized society that became the Dominican Republic favored its "richer, purer" Spanish blood, and it is common for Dominicans to deny their apparent African ancestry. But miscegenation on the Haitian side was far less common, producing a society still closely linked with its African ancestry — and a divisiveness on the island that has endured.
"It's an old tension that has existed almost two centuries," said Marino Vinicio Castillo, president of the nationalist party. "It's obvious that the habits and customs of the Dominicans are not very compatible with the customs and traditions of the disorderly people who arrive from Haiti."
In the months leading up to the Inter- American Court ruling, the country was contending with an economic crisis; anti-Haitian sentiment grew and the government announced a new campaign to "de-Haitianize" the country. Newspapers carried political cartoons depicting ethnic Haitians as monkeys and in racist caricature reminiscent of the Jim Crow days in the United States.
It was in this charged atmosphere that a Dominican woman was murdered in the northwest region of the country. Media reports initially quoted investigators who said they believed the suspects were Haitian, although they later turned out to be Dominican. Mobs reportedly set fire to village homes and burned Haitian- Dominicans alive, and there were reports of shootings, rapes and serial lynching of people of Haitian descent. In a March 2006 letter to President Leonel Fernández, Amnesty International expressed "grave" concern about government indifference to the violence.
Advocates for Haitian-Dominicans risk public demonization. In a nationalistic society, they are often branded anti-patriotic. Few have championed the Haitian-Dominican cause and endured more public criticism for her activism than Sonia Pierre, the director of the Movement for Dominican Women of Haitian Descent (MUDHA) and 2003 recipient of Amnesty International USA's Ginetta Sagan award. "We are part of this country. We did not come here," said Pierre, who was born in the bateyes to Haitian workers. "We are talking about Dominicans that are excluded, discriminated against and marginalized."
Pierre received death threats and her children were followed to school. She fled to New York where the Dominican and Haitian diasporas — who shared the experience of discrimination in the United States — embraced her and rallied together for the cause of ethnic Haitians.
"The Dominicans in the exterior are a force, economically and politically," said Pierre, referring to the millions of dollars sent in remittances that all but subsidize the Dominican economy. "They have an impact and they can change their families."
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El Batey Doce, where harsh living conditions are
typical of camps for Haitian cane cutters. © Stanley Green/AI |
At the church in the Juan Sánchez bateye, a heavy rain falls on the metal roof, and a cool breeze sweeps through the one-room shack. No one can leave the bateye, they say in Spanish accented with Creole. Young men and women remember raids of past, when their parents were plucked from porch seats or their husbands snatched from the side of the road by authorities.
Like the wind, the invisibility and fear of deportation lull the human spirit into complacency, says Juana Frankel, a grassroots pubic health organizer. It has sucked the life and motivation from the bateye. "Young girls can't go to school. Instead they are married," said Frankel, who serves five bateyes that are home to a total of 1,500 families. "They say, 'Well since I can't study, let me go to work or get married.' Because there's nothing else to do."
Cármen Díaz shines as a rarity among the young women resting on the church pews. She's 17, wears a soft pink blouse and big hoop earrings and has refused to marry or have children. Her older brothers received their identification cards many years ago, before the strict new regulations. They work in the capital and go anywhere they please, a luxury she envies.
"I have to stay here. I can't go anywhere because I don't have any papers," said Díaz, inside the crowded church. "The immigration can get me."
Yet in her own way, Díaz has waged a private battle against the system. When school officials refused to let her enter the 8th grade because she lacked a birth certificate, her mother and a brigade of local women pleaded for leniency and won.
"It was like a favor," she said, with
a big smile. It was a small but important
victory, one she could build on if the
government truly adopts the reforms
ordered by the Inter-American Court. If
that happens, and the state recognizes
her as a full-fledged Dominican, she has
a shot at the 9th grade. 
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