When Andres was 12, his Dominican Republic citizenship — his only possession of any real value — was snatched from him by a court ruling targeting people with foreign-born parents.
Ten years later, Andres is still undocumented in the country where he was born, working a backbreaking, low-paying job in the sugarcane fields with little hope of bettering himself.
Andres’s mother is from Haiti, with which the Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola and a long history of migratory conflict.
Photo: AFP
His father, a local, is not in the picture.
“I was born here... My nationality is Dominican,” said the young man who has a birth certificate, but no ID card — a prerequisite for any administrative procedure.
Andres, whose surname is being concealed to protect him, is one of about 250,000 Dominicans born to foreign parents — mainly Haitians — who had their birthright citizenship stripped by a Dominican Constitutional Court ruling in 2013.
The court decided that only people born in the country to Dominican parents or legal residents can be citizens.
The ruling was applied retroactively to all residents born to foreigners from 1929 to 2010 — creating what the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights called “a situation of statelessness of a magnitude never before seen in the Americas.”
Thousands of newly undocumented people have since been expelled from the country of 10.5 million inhabitants — many to Haiti, a country they do not even know.
Many undocumented cane workers like Andres live in bateyes — precarious settlements of rickety wooden houses with outside toilets.
Immigration raids are rare in such settlements, but the cane workers regularly get rounded up when they travel to cities and towns in search of higher-paying jobs or medical care. Even pregnant women have been expelled after going for checkups.
At one settlement near El Seibo, about 120km east of the capital, Santo Domingo, children play on dirt streets while workers play dominoes and make jokes in Creole — a language derived from French that is common in Haiti.
Most batey residents are from Haiti or descendants of Haitians — a throwback from the time of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, who headed the Dominican military from 1932 to 1961 and served as president from 1942 to 1952. Trujillo’s administration had policies in place to entice laborers from Haiti. Most who came to the Dominican Republic were illiterate and were never provided with proper migration papers even though they stayed on as life in neighboring Haiti — the poorest country in the Americas — became increasingly complicated.
There was no visa and no official residence — a situation interpreted by the Constitutional Court as meaning those first generations of workers were merely in transit.
Until the ruling, those born on Dominican soil — except those born to migrants in transit — were automatically citizens. But no longer.
Desperate, some have taken to paying Dominicans to adopt their children, at least on paper, so that they can have ID papers.
The Dominican government in 2014 announced the creation of a special register to formalize the residency status of undocumented laborers.
However, non-governmental organization Participation Ciudadana said only about 27,000 people had gone through the process.
“They are neither from here nor from there,” said 34-year-old Elena Lorac, a rights advocate who is personally affected by the court ruling. “All these policies of denationalization have left us with enormous vulnerability.”
The Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic maintains a bitter relationship with Haiti, dating back to 22 years of Haitian occupation until in 1844.
The illegal immigration of Haitians in the past few years added to the tension and xenophobia.
Many Dominicans talk of an “invasion,” frequently claiming there are as many as 3 million Haitian immigrants and descendants in the country, although officially the number is about 750,000.
“They immediately point me out: ‘This one is Haitian,’ because of my skin color and because I have frizzy hair,” 53-year-old Maria Paul said.
She, too, was born in the Dominican Republic, but has no ID papers.
“My parents were immigrants, but I’m not an immigrant,” she said.
Lorac echoed that sentiment.
“We are here. We are not going anywhere. We don’t even know” Haiti, she said.
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