Vol. 79/No. 34      September 28, 2015

“Since Aug. 2, the government says that it has deported 2,200 Haitian immigrants,” Manuel de Jesús Dandre, a leader of the Dominican-Haitian Cultural Center, said by phone from Santo Domingo Sept. 10. The government had set a May 31 deadline for foreign-born workers to register for legal status.

Haitian-born workers make up a large percentage of sugarcane cutters, workers on banana plantations and the workforce in tourism and construction. Many have lived and worked in the Dominican Republic almost their entire lives, as part of Dominican government-organized programs to guarantee cheap labor for capitalist bosses.

Of the nearly 500,000 Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic, 288,000 have applied for documents that would allow them to keep working legally. “About 110,000 of them have received a sticker like the stamps put on a passport,” Dandre said, “but it’s not a work authorization.” Several thousand, fearing that if they were forcibly deported they would lose everything, packed up their belongings and headed to Haiti.

As many as 300,000 people of Haitian descent who were born and raised in the Dominican Republic also face threats of deportation. In September 2013, the Dominican Supreme Court declared retroactive a 2010 constitutional amendment that denies citizenship to children born in the Dominican Republic if their parents are not citizens.

In the face of criticism by human rights groups around the world and numerous protests in the Dominican Republic, the U.S. and elsewhere, the Dominican government passed a law in May 2014 that divided workers of Haitian descent into two categories: those who had previously been issued official ID cards and were registered as Dominican citizens and those born in the Dominican Republic but who had not been issued official documents or given copies of their birth certificates.

Under the law, the first group would be recognized as citizens but the second would be designated “foreigners.”

The Central Election Board, which oversees birth certificates, often refuses to issue them to Haitian descendants. In the Dominican Republic birth certificates are only valid for six months at a time, Dandre noted.

“That’s what happened to me,” Dandre said. “On July 30 I tried to get my birth certificate so I could renew my passport, but they refused. There’s no explanation. The whole process is arbitrary.”

Roberto Antuan Jose, a lawyer at the Cultural Center, told the Militant he is going to court Sept. 17 representing a young man born in the Dominican Republic whose mother is Haitian. “They gave him a birth certificate that says he is a foreigner. How is it possible that he is a foreigner if he was born in a hospital in the Dominican Republic?”

So far there have been few cases of people born in the Dominican Republic who have been deported, Dandre said, “but the threat is there.”  
 
 
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