Stateless in the Dominican Republic: Lessons from Côte d'Ivoire

Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers of Haitian descent are now stateless and risk imminent deportation if they failed to meet today's deadline to register their residency in the Dominican Republic. 

Animosity between Dominicans and Haitians dates back to the early 19th century when Haiti invaded the Dominican Republic, liberated the slaves and encouraged free blacks from the United States to settle there. Dominican Independence Day does not celebrate independence from Spain, but independence from Haiti in 1844. 

As Rachel Nolan notes in her excellent Harper's piece on the fraught relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, "Haitian immigrants in the D.R. do the menial jobs that most Dominican citizens try to avoid: construction, harvesting fruits and vegetables, cutting sugarcane, cleaning homes, and nannying children."

Since the early 2000s, Dominican authorities have changed national policies on nationality and applied those changes retroactively in a manner that discriminates against Dominicans of Haitian descent. On September 23, 2013, the highest court in the Dominican Republic ruled that people born after 1929 could only be granted citizenship if they had at least one Dominican parent. As part of its ruling, the court also ordered the Central Electoral Board to thoroughly examine country’s civil registry and birth records to remove from them all persons supposedly wrongly registered and recognized as Dominican citizens. After international outcry, the President presented a bill that stating that children born to foreign parents could be citizens, provided they have Dominican government identification documents and are in the civil registry.

But even with these changes, many Dominicans of Haitian descent continue to face obstacles to have their citizenship fully recognized. In the aforementioned Harper's piece Nolan notes: 

The following year, the path to citizenship was made open, if less clear, for the afectados. Under a new law, passed in May 2014, afectados fell into two groups. Those who had been inscribed in the civil registry and issued birth certificates before the Sentence, like Deguis, could be “accredited” as Dominican citizens, which would give them the right to I.D. cards and passports. This group includes about 24,000 people. Those afectados, however, who were born in the Dominican Republic before 2007 but did not have a birth certificate were required to embark on a complicated, uncertain application for naturalization. First they had to prove their birthplace by providing one of four acceptable documents, such as a signed statement from a midwife or witnesses, then they had to apply through the regularization plan. The majority of afectados thus found themselves in a similar position to Haitians who crossed the border more than four years ago, never mind that they had once counted as citizens. The law requires that beginning this June, all immigrants and afectados who have not completed the application, or whose applications have been denied, will be deported.

An optimist might hope that what began as a Dominican court’s massive experiment in denationalization might end in the Dominican government’s massive experiment in naturalization. But difficulties immediately became clear. Even the lucky group of 24,000 afectados with birth certificates had to obtain their I.D. cards from the Junta Central Electoral, the same body that had been denying such papers for years. The protest group reconoci.do has documented at least 150 instances in which afectados in this group were illegally denied papers. The day that I met Deguis, she had been turned down and told she needed to apply at a different office. Deguis finally got her I.D. card on August 1 of last year. For the first time in six years, she could work legally. She received a passport a few weeks later, but it is still not clear whether she will be able to register her four children as citizens. 

The Dominican government may have intended for this regularization path to serve as a window of opportunity, however, the onerous documentary requirements have proved difficult to navigate. For example, to complete the naturalization process, applicants must have an open, active bank account. In the bayetes, the isolated sugar company towns on the border of Haiti and the D.R., most of the applicants are poor, illiterate, and/or lack the necessary documentation to open a bank account in the first place. The government must develop other strategies to verify birth and long-term residence that poor, under-resourced communities can follow. 

In a 2013 LA Times op-ed authors Mark Kurlansky, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz lay out the possibilities of what lies ahead for this population:  "Will [Dominicans of Haitian descent] retreat into hiding, submit to the old conditions of near-slavery in Dominican agro-industry or desperately attempt escape on boats, as reports from Puerto Rico suggest they are already doing?" 

If you do not have papers, you cannot have a business, travel, drive, or even get married.

While the Dominican Republic must tackle administrative obstacles to ensure that Dominicans of Haitian descent with the requisite documents can process their paperwork, the government also has an obligation to address the plight of the nearly 200,000 Haitians who are unable to meet the documentary criteria. With the Haitian government lacking critical capacity and facing political upheaval ahead of its elections later this year, Haiti is unlikely to prove of much help in issuing documents or aiding in repatriation. The prospects for the soon-to-be stateless appear bleak.

For this latter group of Haitians, how can the government make headway in registration and naturalization while not creating a large group of stateless people? For solutions to that, I turn to  Côte d'Ivoire.

The recent rhetoric around these events in the D.R. recall the xenophobic rhetoric of Ivorité and how it created a population of over one million stateless people in Côte d'Ivoire.  Over 12.3% of Côte d'Ivoire is made up of migrants. Law No. 72-853 of December 21, 1972 excluded those who were born abroad - or whose parents were born abroad - from acquiring nationality. For the thousands of people who migrated in the 1950s to till the land, proving such heritage was nearly impossible. This law created a vast stateless population and continues to affect their children and grandchildren. The stateless are like ghosts in the community, present but not recognized. 

In October 2013, a new law came in allowing people to declare their nationality. For identified stateless persons, Côte d'Ivoire granted nationality on the basis of birth in the territory and long-term residence.  Foreign-born residents living in Côte d'Ivoire pre-independence became citizens along with their descendants. Foreign nationals born in Côte d'Ivoire between 1961 and 1973 and their children also qualified. Moreover, to reduce the risk of statelessness, the Ivorian government also reinforced civil registration mechanisms to ensure children are immediately registered after birth and created late birth registration procedures. To guarantee the successful implementation of these changes, Côte d'Ivoire utilized the services of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. In this manner, the Ivorian government managed to address their stateless problem by regularizing long-term residents and tightening procedures for future generations. 

Despite its fraught history and ongoing turmoil, the Dominican Republic might consider implementing similar steps in order to avoid further uproar and to promote a more equitable and amicable relationship between the D.R. and Haiti.

Yale Class Day

I was honored to serve as the 2015 Yale Class Day Co-Chair, where I had the opportunity to meet with Vice President Biden, along with my fellow Co-Chair Jeremy, prior to his remarks. 

Death in the Mediterranean

you have to understand
no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land.

-warsan shire

Nearly 2,000 people have drowned this year trying to get to Europe from the Middle East and Africa. Last weekend, an estimated 800 migrants trying to reach Europe drowned after their boat capsized off the Libyan coast. These desperate people are part of the largest mass migration since World War II. 

Worldwide, the number of people forcibly displaced by conflict or persecution reached 51.2 million in 2014. A large number of those escaping across the Mediterranean come from Syria and Somalia  — which, along with Afghanistan, produce more than half of all refugees worldwide —as well as Eritrea. 

Each day, would-be migrants depart from Libya, with most heading for the Italian island of Lampedusa, the EU territory closest to Libya. They are packed into cramped rubber rafts and fishing boats where they spend hours or days hoping to be rescued before they sink. On the boats, migrants are often deprived of food and water and risk being thrown overboard if they get seasick.

For this perilous journey, human traffickers charge desperate migrants up to £1,300 each.

In a recent emergency conference, European leaders pledged to address the migrant crisis, however, proposals fall short of a serious confrontation of the ethical and human rights considerations at hand. While committing to sharply expanding maritime patrols in the Mediterranean and cracking down on traffickers, European leaders must consider strategies beyond repression and detention. 

For the Syrians, Libyans, Somalis and Eritreans who comprise the majority of this migrant flow to central Europe, we should do what the world did for the Indochinese in the 1970s. We should issue a comprehensive plan for action. As the communist governments of Indochina fell, global powers assembled to offer refugees the opportunity to resettle with the possibility of future repatriation. In the United States, approximately 130,000 refugees from South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were allowed to enter the country under the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act. Across Europe, several other nations implemented similar legislation. Why not consider a similar plan for these refugees due to the sheer magnitude of their exodus? 

For those with mixed motivations for migration (e.g. migrants from other North and Western African nations), instead of bowing to the nationalist rhetoric of many European political parties, it may be time to acknowledge the need for the reform of the immigration system to accommodate migrants at all skill levels. 

Globalization cannot only focus on the movement of goods and ideas. We must develop better strategies to regulate the movement of people too.

This model, supported by François Crépeau, UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, offers the hope of a better life for people who have lived in nothing but chaos for the past few years. By creating such an action plan, Europe can reduce the number of deaths and, in turn, reduce the smuggling business model. 

Considering the role that Western foreign policy has played in the destabilization of countries such as Syria and Libya, we have a moral imperative to develop strategies to cope with the political issues themselves as well as their related effects on the quality of human life. 

To recall that access to water is difficult in Africa, Gambian woman Siabatou Sanneh took the start of the Paris marathon with a can of water on her head.

Local businesses participate in Equal Pay Day

Take a look at Yale Daily News coverage of my efforts (with the help of my great classmates Emma Goldberg and Dianne Lake as well as the Yale Women’s Center) to bring attention to Equal Pay Day in New Haven.

Equal Pay for Equal Work

Originally published in the Yale Daily News on April 14, 2015. 

For graduating seniors, starting salaries are an all-too-common concern, but for soon-to-be alumnae, figuring out next year’s salary may be a little more stressful than for our male counterparts.

From Patricia Arquette’s Oscar speech on the gender wage gap to the recent controversial ruling against Ellen Pao in her gender discrimination lawsuit, women’s rights in the workplace have been a hot topic in the last few months. And rightly so. Today, women make 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

The median weekly earnings for American female doctors working full-time is $1,497 versus $2,087 for men. Women in architecture and engineering earn 83.7 cents to a man’s dollar. The gender pay gap stretches across almost every industry. Even in nursing, a profession where women outnumber men 10 to one, men out-earn women by nearly $7,700 per year in outpatient settings and nearly $3,900 in hospitals. From blue-collar to white-collar jobs, women aren’t getting equal pay for equal work.

While the world these days tells us to “lean in,” it isn’t all that simple.

The wage gap stems not only from the persistent underestimation and under appreciation of women’s contributions in the workplace, but also from stigma surrounding salary negotiations.

Even if a woman knows her worth, negotiating a salary can come with a cost. For years, studies on salary negotiation have shown that the social cost of negotiating for higher pay is greater for women than it is for men. Before we chime in to criticize women for not “leaning in,” we must recognize that women’s hesitancy to ask for a raise often stems from an intuitive sense of the risks.

But the burden of advocating for equal pay should not be shouldered by women alone.

We can start by recognizing women’s worth in the workplace. According to popular gender stereotypes, when men are assertive, they are often called “leaders.” When women do the same, they risk being labeled “bossy” or “pushy.” Men are expected to be ruthless and women nurturing. Because we expect women to fulfill the “mother hen” role, we are less likely to reward them for being a team player.

A recent study by New York University psychologist Madeline Heilman found that male employees were continually viewed more favorably than women when giving the same help to a colleague. As Sheryl Sandberg recently noted in The New York Times, this means that women “do the lion’s share of office housework” — with little recognition. It’s time to acknowledge the contributions of women and compensate them fairly. Men can help by volunteering to take over some of the group tasks. By doing so, we can give women more opportunities to have their voices more fully heard.

Ellen Pao, interim CEO of Reddit, has a rather innovative idea for the private sector: eliminate the salary negotiation process entirely. In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Pao noted that “men negotiate harder than women do and sometimes women get penalized when they do negotiate.” Most government jobs have fixed salaries based on title and years of experience. Because these salary rates are public information, workers can easily compare pay, reducing the likelihood that bias will impact compensation. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the wage gap is considerably smaller in the public sector. According to the Office of Personnel Management, between 1992 and 2012, the gender pay gap for public sector workers fell from 30 percent to 13 percent for white-collar workers and 11 percent for General Schedule workers.

Finally, we can more directly confront our unconscious biases. Everyone has them. Taking an Implicit Association Test will quickly disabuse you of the notion that you are the most forward-thinking, progressive person at work. And that’s okay — as long as you work at recognizing and correcting these preferences. Google is a great example of a company at the forefront of this movement in the tech industry. Google made efforts to encourage its employees to confront their biases with the hope that that awareness could help level the playing field.

Today, women make up the majority of college graduates and hold the majority of management and professional positions, but according to the World Economic Forum, I’ll be 102 years old by the time the gender wage gap closes in the United States. While laws like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 are a good first step towards equal pay, they clearly aren’t the only solution. In order to make sure women are recognized for the vital role they play in the home and the workplace, we must confront the problem at hand