Vol. 77/No. 39      November 4, 2013

Militant/Seth Galinsky

Oct. 17 protest in N.Y. against court decision stripping many Haitian-Dominicans’ citizenship.

He was referring to the Sept. 23 decision by the Constitutional Court that Dominicans born after 1929 are no longer citizens, if their parents are not legal permanent residents. There are some 300,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent who face a range of problems, including possible deportation. In addition there are as many as 1 million Haitians who work and live in the Dominican Republic.

Michel, originally from Haiti, has lived in the Dominican Republic since 1974 and spent more than a decade cutting sugarcane. He has been involved in the fight to defend the rights of Haitians there since 1977 and now works full time for the Dominican-Haitian Human Rights Committee.

“If you don’t have papers, you can’t study, you can’t get social security, you can’t get a lot of jobs,” Michel said. “If we are united we can do a lot of things. We can fight for the rights of immigrants and for Dominican-Haitians to go to school.”

For decades sugar and banana plantation owners have taken advantage of the immense poverty in neighboring Haiti as a source of cheap labor. Haitians and their Dominican-born descendants have faced widespread discrimination in hiring, housing, education and access to government services.

Today almost all cane cutters are Haitian, often living in shacks without electricity or running water. The vast majority of construction workers in the country are Dominicans of Haitian descent or Haitian, as are about one-third of domestic workers.

Until recently the constitution said that all those born in the country are citizens, except for children of diplomats and of visitors “in transit,” understood to be 10 days or less. But this hasn’t prevented the government from carrying out mass deportations that include some who were born in the country or have government work permits. In 1991, the New York Times reports, “more than 50,000 Haitians and dark-skinned Dominicans” were deported by President Joaquín Balaguer. In 2003, 37,000 were deported and in 2005 as many as 25,000.

In 2004 the government of President Leonel Fernández passed a law saying that workers who did not have government-issued residency permits were in transit, including farmworkers with temporary work permits, no matter how many years or decades they have lived there.

In 2007 the Central Electoral Board, which is in charge of the country’s civil registry, instructed its offices to withhold copies of birth certificates and ID cards to those with “questionable” citizenship. Birth certificate copies are only valid for three months, but they are needed to obtain ID cards, marry, register for school, to apply for some jobs and even get a cellphone plan.

Many who have lived their whole life in the Dominican Republic, had never been to Haiti nor speak Haitian creole were told their names sounded Haitian, or they looked Haitian and were denied papers.

“Fernández was the architect of this new anti-Haitian machinery,” Juan Telemín said by phone from Guaymate Oct. 22. Telemín is the national coordinator of Reconoci.do, which was formed at the end of 2010 to combat the accelerating anti-Haitian moves.

In 2010 a new constitution was adopted that bars the children of anyone who “resides illegally in Dominican territory” from citizenship from then on. There were no protests at the time “because we thought those of us already here would not be affected,” Telemín said. “We didn’t think it was prudent. But they didn’t just take an inch or a mile, they took 60 miles.”

The 60 miles, Telemín said, is the September Constitutional Court ruling that makes the denial of citizenship retroactive.

The decision has sparked intense debate. “In the name of order, public peace and the preservation of the nationality and the homeland,” columnist Matías Bosch wrote in Listin Diario, a major daily, “a real social apartheid is being established.”

Several hundred people, mostly Haitian-American and some Dominicans, protested the decision Oct. 17 in New York.

“I feel this is a disgrace,” public transit worker Charles Joseph said at the action. “The whole world must know what is going on in the Dominican Republic and protest until they overturn this.”
 
 
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