Dominican community split over immigration policy

Supporters of the Dominican government rallied in front of the office of the Dominican consul general in Park Square last week.

Two weeks ago, prominent Haitian and Dominican activists and elected officials stood in front of the State House to protest the Dominican government’s denial of citizenship rights to descendants of Haitian migrants to the Caribbean nation.

Last week, the scene in front of the Dominican consulate was markedly different as a predominantly Haitian group of protesters squared off against a smaller group of Dominicans demonstrating in support of the Dominican government. That protest was perhaps the most visible sign of a rift within the Boston-area Dominican community over their government’s new immigration policy, which critics say will effectively render stateless more than 200,000 people born in the Dominican Republic.

The conflict has played out on social media and in local Spanish language media. The July 8 edition of El Mundo features the Dominican Consul General for New England, Carmen Milagros Almonte, alleging a Boston and New York-centered lobbying campaign against the Dominican government. On the same pages, television personality David Suazo slams award-winning novelist Junot Diaz for his criticism of the Dominican government, referring to him as “Judas Diaz, the Rat of Cambridge.”

“He is engaged in a campaign of defamation against the Dominican Republic,” Suazo said in an interview with the Banner. “For that reason, I called him a rat.”

Cambridge City Councilor Dennis Benzan, who sponsored a resolution condemning the Dominican Government’s planned deportations, said the divisions in the Dominican community are largely between first- and second-generation immigrants, with Dominicans born here generally opposed to the deportations.

“The vast majority of U.S.-born Dominicans do not support the Dominican government,” Benzan said.

Constitutional changes

The current crisis began in 2013, when the Dominican Republic’s Constitutional Court issued a ruling retroactively denying citizenship to people born there to Haitian immigrants after 1929. Although the Dominican Republic, like the United States, offers citizenship to anyone born on Dominican soil, the country’s constitution has long maintained an exception for a category of immigrants termed “persons in transit,” which includes diplomats, and now with the court ruling, Haitians.

For decades, Haitians have been crossing from the side of the island occupied by their country into the Dominican Republic to work, mostly in the agricultural sector. Haiti has the poorest economy in the Americas, while the Dominican Republic has the strongest economy in the Caribbean. The Dominican government set a June 17 deadline for immigrants to establish their citizenship. Those unable to do so are now facing deportation.

The Dominican government estimates that 240,000 migrant workers initiated the process of registering, but only 9,000 were able to provide documentation of legal residency. The challenge could be equally difficult for Dominican-born Haitian descendants, many of whom were born in rural areas where births are not always recorded.

More than 2,000 Dominican soldiers were deployed to assist with deportations, and human rights observers fear that Haitian descendants and other dark-skinned Dominicans could be rounded up and sent to Haiti, a country where they do not speak the language and have no known relatives.

So far, the Dominican government estimates that 17,000 Haitian immigrants have voluntarily left the country. With Haiti still recovering from a powerful 2010 earthquake, it’s unlikely the country will have the capacity to house and feed the migrants, leading activists to warn of an impending humanitarian crisis.

While activists have been outspoken in their denunciation of the Dominican government, the international community remains largely silent. Suazo says no other countries are willing to do for Haiti what the Dominican Republic has done, absorbing tens of thousands of migrants.

“Right now 15 percent of what the Dominican government spends on medical care goes to the Haitian population in the Dominican Republic,” he said. “People should be saying more positive things about the Dominican Republic.”

Suazo and other defenders of the Dominican government point to the United States, which has deported more than two million immigrants during the six-and-a-half years of the Obama administration.

A history of conflict

Haiti and the Dominican Republic both occupy the island of Hispanola, which was invaded by Christopher Columbus in 1492. After its indigenous population was slaughtered, the Spanish began importing African slaves to work in the island’s agricultural sector. During Haiti’s war of independence, Toussaint L’Overture invaded Santo Domingo on the Dominican side of the island to secure the port. The Haitian forces left Santo Domingo in 1805, but returned in 1822 for an occupation that lasted 22 years. That occupation rankled the Dominican elite, many of whom lost positions of authority to the Haitians, whom they considered inferior due to their dark skin.

That history of invasion sowed the seeds of Dominican resentment. That resentment boiled over in 1937, when Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the slaughter of more than 10,000 Haitian immigrants. Trujillo openly supported Adolph Hitler’s white supremacist views and defended the massacre as a means of whitening the Dominican population. His anti-Haitian rhetoric has been codified in a Dominican school of thought called antihaitianismo. Joaquin Balaguer, who succeeded Trujillo as head of state, also defended the massacre and espoused Trujillo’s virulent antihaitianismo rhetoric.

Antihaitianismo?

While many see the current push to deport as an extension of the country’s racist past, Almonte, the Dominican ambassador, vehemently denied racism was behind the planned deportation of Haitian immigrants, noting that they are treated in Dominican hospitals, educated in Dominican schools without prejudice and compete in the Dominican labor market.

Yet as the country prepares to deport the Haitian migrants, episodes of anti-Haitian mob violence, posted on social media, suggest the hostility of decades past is alive and well. In February, a Haitian teenager was beaten and hanged in a public square in Santiago.

“It’s pure racism,” says Gloribel Mota, who heads the nonprofit Neighbors United for a Better East Boston. “You can see the integration of racist ideology in today’s events. There’s no massacre, but there’s this clear distinction between what is Dominican and what is Haitian.”

Mota, who grew up in the United States, said she has long been disturbed by the racial attitudes she has seen in the Dominican Republic, where her father still lives.

“In the Dominican Republic, the lighter you are, the more desirable you are,” she said. “It’s based on the same ideology that slavery was based on here.”

Benzan says he has had first-hand experiences of that color discrimination. In a 2005 trip to the Dominican Republic, he, Junot Diaz and Boston restaurateur Hector Piña visited a night club. While Piña was allowed in the club, Diaz and Benzan were denied admittance by a bouncer to told them they were too dark-skinned to enter.

“I’ve been the victim of discrimination in the Dominican Republic,” he said. “That’s me. Imagine what the Haitians have to put up with.”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story stated incorrectly that Junot Diaz supports a boycott against the Dominican Republic. He does not.