Trato Digno Letter on International Migrants Day
An urgent call to talk about migration and the rights that move wherever people go.
Taking stock of public policies on International Migrants Day, the Centers for Migration Observation and Social Development in the Caribbean (OBMICA) and for Sustainable Development (CEDESO), through the coordination of the Trato Digno Project, consider the recent restrictive measures taken by the Dominican State to be a discouraging turn in migration-management policies, one that exposes people in mobility to living unprotected and falling into networks of exploitation, migrant smuggling, and possible human trafficking.
In the Dominican Republic, this Migrants Day finds us with serious challenges: a government administration that has taken a discouraging turn in public policies, disregarding its own laws and mandates. Not even in the most negative projections was there a scenario of persecution and mass deportation of pregnant migrant women, or an administrative order denying access to public-health services on the basis of migration status or documentary situation, limiting care to emergency cases. This is how the Constitution and agreements binding on the country are violated. This is a significant setback in human rights and migration governance that exposes low-income foreigners to living in complete unprotection and falling into networks of exploitation, migrant smuggling, and possible human trafficking.
Since last September, the Dominican government has announced restrictive measures that make the situation more difficult for migrants, particularly those who do not have regular status or who, having applied to the National Plan for the Regularization of Foreigners (PNRE), now find themselves out of status. The measures place even more pressure on Haitian mothers and pregnant women and add to the burden that women carry, as the responsibility for maintenance, care, and health attention of the whole family socially falls on them.
The arbitrary deportations suffered by hundreds of pregnant and breastfeeding migrant women detained in recent months in hospital environments when they were about to seek medical assistance for themselves or their children constitute an unprecedented violation of the fundamental right to health, gender equity, the mandate of maternity protection, and the rights of children and adolescents. The issue has been widely documented by civil society in reports and in the press, as shown in the documentary "Undignified Deportations."
Closing off public-health services to migrants with irregular status has drawn rejection from social organizations and from the Dominican Medical Association itself, because it would be calling on health-service providers to violate their social commitment and work ethic, while hospitals, whose mission is to guarantee the health of all, become spaces of discrimination on the basis of documentary and migration status.
The measures are counterproductive in a pandemic context, when the State does not provide effective means for migrants to maintain regular status. For a year, more than 200,000 foreigners who applied to the 2014 National Plan for the Regularization of Foreigners and were granted a migration category had no opportunity to renew the documents accrediting their status; now they are surprised by the terse announcement of an audit, as a sort of prelude to dismantling a process in which the Dominican State invested years and millions of pesos and in which people participated in good faith.
The results of years of research and field experience show that a hard-line policy against migrants has proven highly ineffective, as well as illegal and inhumane. Measures for migration control must be sustained within the legal framework and the rights system, provide people with clear avenues to migrate and regularize their status, strengthen competencies and improve the working conditions of migration agents, military personnel, and surveillance staff, dignify points of entry, and modernize inspection mechanisms at the border in order to avoid irregular migration. In other words, it is urgent to design and implement public policies on the basis of studying the issue and of evidence.
Haitian and Venezuelan migrants, the foreign population groups with the greatest presence in the country, contribute through their work to the development of the Dominican Republic. They are inserted into sectors of the economy that demand their labor, enabling growth and competitiveness, such as tourism, construction, education, services, and areas that are still not sufficiently valued, such as paid domestic and agricultural work.
Social platforms and the press are valuable allies in projecting a fair image of migrants. Stigmatizing migrants, presenting them as a danger or threat to the well-being of host countries, is part of a narrative that distracts and that is increasingly losing force among the public. Haitian migrant women are not the cause of the weakness of the public health system. Shifting onto them the responsibility for years of neglect, ineffective management, and corruption of the system is an error that has logically caused broad rejection and indignation nationwide.
Along this path, the solidarity of the great majority of Dominican medical personnel, social communicators, neighborhood and peasant organizations, and communities stands out, as they distance themselves from the institutionalization of abuse and support the defense of migrants' rights, especially those in greatest vulnerability such as older adults, children and adolescents, pregnant women, and nursing mothers, whom the law protects from deportation and orders special protection for. Just as they did during the pandemic, doctors and nurses once again courageously defend the fundamental right to health and focus attention on an unequal system that leaves impoverished people without options.
More than two million Dominicans are migrants. Seeing ourselves in the mirror of people who move in search of opportunities is to feel the heartbeat of the humanity that strongly unites us. We all are, or have been in some way, migrants, carving out a path to begin a career, making new friends at school or in a neighborhood where we have to start from zero. Starting over somewhere else certainly makes us vulnerable, but it also brings out the best in people: their courage, their determination to struggle, and to help the family that remains in the home they left behind.
The reasons for migration are multifactorial: poverty, lack of employment, political persecution, the need for social recognition, and the construction of a more promising future for new generations. The dream of the young man who pays thousands of dollars to cross the Atacama Desert, the Colombian jungle, or the dreaded Mexico-United States border - perhaps risking his life on a train or in a container - is the same as that of the construction worker or the woman with the popsicle cart who crossed the Masacre River on foot and had to pass dozens of checkpoints to reach Santo Domingo. Guaranteeing the rights of migrants, wherever they may be, is to defend with integrity the Dominican identity built with the contributions of those who one day decided to leave and toil in a factory or a family home; it is to respect work as a means of advancement.
In the Trato Digno Project we promote respect for migrants' rights and compliance with due process in deportation matters, essential elements of a humane and respectful management of migration. We contribute to the work of government actors by sharing field experiences and knowledge that can improve a series of practices that must remain in the past. That Dominican families today mourn the loss of young people who fell victim to smugglers in Mexico, that a migration agent seeks out a woman in a hospital bathroom, that a woman in labor is put on a migration bus with the intention of deporting her - all this challenges our humanity and makes it urgent to speak about people in mobility and the rights that move wherever people go.
CEDESO and OBMICA
December 18, 2021