DR changing their law in 2010. why not in 1844? or 1945? or 1975? A little convenient don't you think? DR, as all nations do, (and i have said this before check the thread), has a right to regulate immigration but creating thousands of stateless persons (they can then legally deny them access to healthcare, political representation, and schools etc) and mass deportations + Dominican hatred of Haiti and Haitians has all the makings of a human rights emergency. Haiti cannot handle hundreds of thousands of migrants.
Dominicans of Haitian descent scramble for residency amid deportation threat
Haitian Jaquenol Martinez shows a card that proves that he has worked in the Dominican sugar cane fields since 1963, while trying to apply for a temporary resident permit, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Photograph: Ezequiel Abiu Lopez/AP
Sibylla Brodzinsky
Tuesday 16 June 2015 12.47 EDTLast modified on Tuesday 16 June 2015 15.53 EDT
Yesenia Originé has never been to
Haiti and has no interest in going.
She was born in the Dominican city of San Pedro de Macorís to Haitian parents. But because she has no papers to prove it, she, like thousands of other people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic, risks being rounded up and deported to the neighboring country.
Many people in Originé’s situation are fearing the worst ahead of the Wednesday deadline for an estimated 500,000 undocumented persons living in the Dominican Republic to register with government authorities. The country’s authorities have reportedly lined up a fleet of buses and established processing centers on the border with Haiti, prompting widespread fears of mass roundups of Dominicans of Haitian descent.
“If they send me there, I don’t know what I’ll do,” says 22-year-old Originé who lives in a
batey
– a company town for sugarcane workers – in the south-west of the Dominican Republic.
A 2013 court ruling stripped children of Haitian migrants their citizenship retroactively to 1930, leaving tens of thousands of Dominican-born people of Haitian descent stateless.
International outrage over the ruling led the Dominican government to pass a law last year that allows people born to undocumented foreign parents, whose birth was never registered in the Dominican Republic, to request residency permits as foreigners. After two years they can apply for naturalisation.
However many have actively resisted registering as foreigners because they say they are Dominican by birth and deserve all the rights that come with it – for example a naturalised citizen cannot run for high office.
Beneco Enecia, director of a community development group called Cedeso that works with Haitian immigrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent in the town of Tamayo, says his organization does not recommend those born in the Dominican Republic to apply for residency. “We tell people to resist and we will continue to press for their recognition as citizens,” he says. “They are Dominican, not Haitian.”
But that means that after the 17 June deadline, people in Originé’s situation could be picked up and sent to the border. “There are rumours that on the 18th there will be a roundup at the
batey,” she says. “I’m afraid to go out on to the street.”
Interior minister Ramón Fadul has denied there will be mass roundups. But major general Rubén Darío Paulino,
the country’s director of migration, told local press that 2,000 police and military officers and 150 inspectors had received special training for deportations.
“Things will happen slowly at first,” predicts Wade McMullen, a lawyer with Robert F Kennedy Human Rights, a US-based advocacy center. “The Dominican government will likely be very careful about taking any action that can be deemed massive,” he says.
Under the regularization program, non-citizens who could establish their identity and prove they arrived before October 2011 are also eligible for residency. But for many Haitian migrants – born in Haiti but living undocumented in the Dominican Republic – getting passports or identity cards from their country’s embassy has proven slow and costly. Many cannot show they have been in the country for more than five years because employers refuse to admit they have been hiring illegals.
Fadul said 250,000 people have started the application process for residency but that only 10,000 had met all the requirements. So far, only about 300 have actually received permits. Those with proof of application, however, will not be deported, he said.
Throughout the year during which the regularization plan has been implemented, recent immigrants continue to be picked up and expelled under a programme known as the Shield. In the first quarter of 2015 some 40,000 people have been deported to Haiti. Human rights groups have also documented numerous incidents in which people on their way to apply for residency were swept up and taken to the border.
Haiti and the Dominican Republic share a long history of tension and mistrust, since Haiti occupied its neighbour militarily three times in the early nineteenth century with the intent of unifying the island under a single rule. In the early 20th century, tens of thousands of migrant workers from Haiti were hired to work in Dominican sugar cane fields and often stayed after the harvest, while others have crossed the porous border to escape political violence or seeking better economic opportunities.
Today Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere and remains crippled after a devastating earthquake in 2010.
It’s the last place Ogoriné wants to go. “I’m desperate, I may have to go into hiding” she says. “Whenever I see the military or police now I tremble with fear.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/16/dominican-republic-haiti-deportation-residency-permits
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