Coronavirus and Pre-existing Inequalities: Mobilities in the Dominican Republic

The Dominican state has taken measures to counter the effects of the pandemic. However, not all the population lives under the same reality. Not all vulnerabilities are equal. Ana Maria Belique, leader of the Reconoci.do movement, opened the webinar Coronavirus and Pre-existing Inequalities: Mobilities in the Dominican Republic, organized by OBMICA and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES) on May 7. Her words warn us of the risk of essentializing vulnerability. She invites us to understand that each group has its own particularities, and within each group there are different realities affecting situations of vulnerability and resilience.

Read this article in English here: The harsh reality of some Caribbean diasporas impacted by the pandemic

Major migrant collectives being overlooked

Roudy Joseph, leader of the Haitianos RD Collective, points out that in the High-Level Commission to confront coronavirus in the Dominican Republic, the word immigrant has never been mentioned, nor has there even been any discussion of the condition of migrant workers. According to Miguel Otaiza, president of the Venezuelan Colony Foundation in the Dominican Republic (FUNCOVERD), Venezuelan migrants are also being excluded. Most Haitian migrants, their descendants, and Venezuelan migrants are not eligible to benefit from the measures taken by the government because they work in the informal sector without a Dominican ID card.

Civil society organizations have reported that even descendants of Haitians born in the Dominican Republic who already have an ID card were likewise unable to access the social-assistance program Stay at Home. Today, in the midst of a global pandemic, the institutional exclusion that has produced persistent inequalities to date is being laid bare. This matters even more now because coronavirus can spread more easily within excluded communities that lack the measures and resources needed to confront it. In short, the webinar highlighted especially difficult situations for migrant women who work in family homes, as they are doubly exposed during the pandemic. On the one hand, they risk losing their jobs without necessarily receiving labor benefits. On the other, if they remain in paid domestic work, they risk being infected in other peoples homes and/or being accused of bringing COVID-19 into the household where they work.

More light than shadow

In May 2012, Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz published Monstro, a science-fiction story narrating the post-apocalyptic scenario of a mysterious viral outbreak in Haiti threatening the Dominican Republic and thus the whole island of Hispaniola. The Dominican-American authors dystopian future resonates today just as it did when it was published. In analyzing the effects of COVID-19 in 2020, Bridget Wooding, Director of OBMICA, argues that a new landscape is emerging. So far, there has been more light than shadow regarding good-neighborliness in pandemic management at the island scale.

Unlike the Dominican-American authors fiction with its commonplaces about diseases originating in Haiti and collateral dangers for the Dominican Republic, these truisms are not circulating under COVID-19. While there has been an intelligent use of the border as a humanitarian corridor, as also happened during the 2010 earthquake emergency in Haiti, what is new is the dynamism of other mobilities, for example tens of thousands of spontaneous returns of Haitians to their country, among others. The sound decision by Dominican authorities to suspend deportations of migrants in irregular situations is a step forward.

In this forced pause, it is up to island authorities to take advantage of this easing in order to devise fairer migration policies. The short story Monstro describes how deportations are carried out over a freckle, that is, on the basis of racial profiling. The moment is opportune to turn toward migration policies that are more respectful of human rights. It is up to insular civil society to advocate for the inclusion and integration of these long-established migrants and their families, who have until now been excluded.

Note: The webinar is available at the following link: FES and OBMICA, Webinar Coronavirus and Pre-existing Inequalities: Mobilities in the Dominican Republic (May 8, 2020), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmNe7om7MHY.