Undocumented Haitians in Dominican Republic face uncertainty
OUANAMINTHE, HAITI— Several mornings a week for the past five years, Smith Laflur has left his one-room cinder-block shack, walked past the stray goats and the sour cherry tree, down the quiet dirt lanes and out into the shouts and motorcycle roar of this clamouring border town.
He has stepped around the smouldering trash piles and the clothes drying on the bank of the Massacre River, which separates Haiti from the Dominican Republic, and hopped onto the border bridge on his way to another day’s work. At the metal gate, he hasn’t shown a passport but mentioned his boss, a customs official who owns several houses, and crossed into Dajabon.
Over the years, Laflur has built a swimming pool, erected concrete walls, fixed toilets and swept the patio at the Drink Bar — hard manual labour that feeds his five children but is harder to find in his native Haiti. But his daily routine, and the livelihoods for hundreds of thousands of Haitians, has been put at risk by new immigration rules that intend to oust Haitians who don’t have documentation from the Dominican Republic, even those who were born there.
“Everything we can get is here,” Laflur said. “I don’t know how to find work in Haiti.”
In the days before the June 17 deadline for undocumented migrants to register for residency permits — if they could prove they lived in the Dominican Republic before 2011 — many predicted police roundups and waves of deportations. So far, more than 12,000 Haitians have voluntarily left, fearing that such a crackdown could turn violent.
Ouanaminthe is now the scene of returning Haitian families packed into trucks lashed high with suitcases and burlap sacks. In their rush, they abandoned furniture and appliances; some said immigration agents stole money or threatened harm if they didn’t flee.
The Dominican government has encouraged these departures, with free bus rides to the border.
“The government of the Dominican Republic has not expelled one person as of this hour,” Roberto Rodriguez Marchena, the president’s spokesman, said a week after the deadline.
“We didn’t create this; we didn’t invent this to mistreat people or expel people. What we want — and the international community has to understand this — we want to order our country. Please, let us bring order to our country.”
Rodriguez said a quarter of the country’s health budget is consumed by an estimated 600,000 Haitians or people of Haitian descent, living in the country illegally and not paying taxes, and more than 40 per cent of the births along the border are to Haitian women.
So far, 288,000 people have begun the registration process. The remainder, roughly the same number, are subject to deportations if the government chooses.
“These people,” Rodriguez said, “that are in our territory should go to Haiti and look for their documents, and then request to come to our country with a student visa, or a work visa. . . . In our government, we’re not going to abuse a single person.”
The country’s far northern border has seen some of the worst moments in the troubled relationship between these Hispaniola island neighbours. When sugar prices fell in the 1930s, the Dominican government sought to drive out Haitian cane cutters. Dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered a bloody military campaign that became known as “the Harvest,” with soldiers slaughtering more than 10,000 Haitians.
Leonilda Jus moved with her aunt to the Dominican
“Hunger doesn’t have a flag, nor a border, nor a colour, nor politics. It’s hunger. It’s necessity.” ANA CARRASCO RESTAURANT OWNER
Republic in 1974. She grew up cutting sugar cane, picking tomatoes, digging onions. She gave birth to 12 children, nine of whom survived, and eventually moved to the northern city of Santiago. The sugar cane industry has shrivelled, but her sons found jobs in construction and on farms.
Two of them, Thony Dume, 29, and Félix Mondésir, 24, were working on an addition to the rented shack in Ouanaminthe where they had moved four days before, to make room for more relatives.
“It wasn’t a problem living there before. The police and many others knew me,” Dume said. “But now things are too hot.”
Over the years, Dajabon, the Dominican border town, has grown into a bustling commercial centre, with vendors selling at the market to Haitian customers. The shoppers crowd the border bridge with goods stacked on their heads, loaded into wheelbarrows and motorcycle carts.
“They make our economy dynamic,” said Ana Carrasco, 53, who retired from local government to run a restaurant. “People come to buy eggs, chicken, spa- ghetti. If they don’t buy it in this market, they don’t eat. Hunger doesn’t have a flag, nor a border, nor a colour, nor politics. It’s hunger. It’s necessity.”
Until recently, Carrasco used Haitian labourers to work in her restaurant and clean her home. She supported the registration effort but worried about how the policy might harm the economy.
“This issue affects my business, because my employees can’t come to work,” she said. “But we have to resolve this — the country should be able to know who they are. You have to do it, for everyone’s sanity. No matter what the cost, it needs to happen.”
On Hiroshi Rodriguez’s rice farms, the manual labour is done by trucked-in Haitian workers, because, as he said, “Dominicans don’t want to work.”
On separate occasions, soldiers and immigration officials have taken them away. He finds it particularly frustrating because soldiers, he said, take bribes from the farmers to let the day labourers pass the highway checkpoints.
“The government is going to have to recognize that all the companies need them,” he added. “Pretty soon this is going to explode.”
On Saturday morning, Smith Laflur headed for the bridge. It was his son’s third birthday, and if he was going to afford a present, he needed to get to the Drink Bar. He pushed through the crowd to the border gate. He told him who he was, and his boss’s name, but this time the guard shook his head.
“Not today,” he said. “Things aren’t good right now.”
Laflur argued for a while, then turned away and sat on the railing over the river. In the past, he’d considered trying to get to the United States, but he was afraid of the open ocean. He didn’t have the money to apply for a Haitian passport, and his boss in the Dominican Republic had never helped him with a work permit. He was tired of sneaking around.
“I want to arrive in a country with my own papers,” he said. “I want to be able to walk as a free man.”