The Harsh Reality of Some Caribbean Diasporas Swept Up by the Pandemic

The cry of a baby heard softly while the first speaker is talking seems ironically appropriate to present and represent the harsh reality of Dominican and Haitian diasporas in Chile and the United States during the pandemic. The webinar of OBMICA and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES), titled “The New Challenges of Transnationalism: Haitian and Dominican diasporas under the spotlight in the U.S. and Chile in the era of COVID-19,” took place on June 18.

From Santiago de Chile

Wenzer Salomon, from the Platform of Haitian Organizations in Chile, stated: “Migration is a way of living; it is crying out for help in a different way.” The need for help comes both from migrants themselves, who move in search of better opportunities, and from relatives in the country of origin who expect the support that members of the diaspora can send them. However, with the pandemic, support from the diaspora has been reversed: Hector Villanueva of the Dominican Society in Chile (SODOENCHI) points out that the situation is so difficult that the Dominican diaspora is now asking for help from relatives in the Dominican Republic. It is Dominicans and Haitians who have not formalized their stay in Chile who are going through the hardest times. Some are living on the street, some manage to stay with friends but often in overcrowded conditions, and others have nothing to eat. All are in a situation of greater vulnerability under COVID-19. In addition, Mr. Villanueva notes that there are undocumented immigrants who tested positive for COVID-19 but were turned away by hospitals and clinics because beds were being reserved for Chileans.

The threatening others

However, this nationalist discrimination does not develop on its own. The front page of the Chilean newspaper La Segunda, with a photograph of an Afro-descendant person and their child to illustrate the spread of the coronavirus, demonstrates this very well. Acting against national racism in the midst of the pandemic has not been easy in Chile for immigrants from the Dominican and Haitian diasporas. The complex links between nationalism and racism have long been studied. Researchers state that “In Chile, as in most migrant-receiving societies, racism is strongly conditioned by nationalist ideology and by mechanisms and representations of class hierarchization.” The conglomerate of race, nation, and class facilitates the exploitation and subordination of undocumented immigrant workers, something lamented by the speakers from the Dominican and Haitian diasporas.

Complications for those who want to return home or continue their migratory trajectory

The complexities of this situation do not stop for those who decided to leave Chile because of the lack of opportunities and the collapse of their dreams there. They are mostly Haitians who have arrived in recent years and Dominicans whose diaspora in Chile is relatively recent. Most Dominicans in Chile entered irregularly, which has caused them problems because of the informal work to which they dedicate themselves. Mr. Villanueva underlines the sum of great economic instability, lack of academic and work opportunities, and discrimination.

Many Dominicans have tried to return to the Dominican Republic, but have not succeeded on the few flights available because of lack of necessary resources and other problems. Meanwhile, the Chilean state was trying to reverse a Supreme Court ruling prohibiting the signing of a certificate barring return to Chile for nine years for people leaving the country under the humanitarian return regime. This took place together with the continuation of pending expulsion processes. As for the Haitian diaspora, those who want to leave Chile do not necessarily want to return to Haiti, but rather try to reach the United States by crossing on foot, by motorcycle, and by truck through the countries separating them from their final destination, another “El Dorado.”

From California and New York

Guerline Jozef, director of Haitian Bridge Alliance, based in California, began the discussion on diasporas in the United States by speaking of the countless challenges of the journey from Chile to the United States. In addition to the violence and considerable difficulties Haitians may face during the trip, since January 2019, when they finally arrive at the U.S. border, they must return to Mexico to wait for their asylum hearing, the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols. These protocols are part of a broad panoply of U.S. government laws intended to block the entry of migrants and asylum seekers into the United States. Even when migrants manage to enter the United States, they can be deported, even in the midst of the pandemic. Indeed, under the current circumstances more than 400 deportation flights have been recorded from the United States to countries such as Haiti and the Dominican Republic, while with border closures around the world the trend has been to suspend or reduce deportations.

Reasons for deportation

These deportations are not only for convicted persons who have served prison sentences in the United States. Immigrants who violated immigration laws or even curfew during quarantine in the United States may be detained and deported.

Alba Lucero Villa, director of the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights (NMCIR), gives the example of the risk faced by Dominicans exercising their right to participate in protests against the police killing of George Floyd. She had pointed out that the structural racism suffered by Afro-descendants in the United States is not different from the structural racism affecting the U.S. immigration system. Ms. Jozef recalls one of the most terrible instances of this history of migratory racism, which occurred between 1991 and 1993 with another virus, HIV/AIDS. Hundreds of Haitian refugees living with HIV/AIDS were detained in detention centers in Cuba, Guantanamo Bay, because of the false hypothesis that the virus originated in Haiti and that Haitians were more exposed than others.

The current situation in detention centers, which do not comply with coronavirus prevention measures and do not even release all those who are most vulnerable to the virus, is another strong example of violations of international standards and immigrants' rights. For good reason, Ms. Villa describes it as “a pandemic within a pandemic.”

However, immigrants in detention centers are not the only ones confronting the weaknesses of an immigration system undermined by structural racism. The Dominican and Haitian diasporas face it in their everyday lives as well. Ms. Villa emphasizes that “the pandemic has exposed the systematic failures that exist in our community and the inequality that has existed in communities of color for decades […] through negligence by different levels of the federal government that create the conditions for our communities to feel the harshest effects of crisis situations such as these.”

It is no coincidence that communities of color, including Latinos, have the highest incidence of coronavirus deaths in the United States. This is due to the lack of access to basic services such as health care and the disregard of their rights. Those immigrants who did not have a green card or U.S. citizenship were unable to access state aid programs responding to the pandemic, except in California thanks to the fund created by its governor. Even in ethnically mixed families, access to social-assistance programs is at stake in the United States in the framework of increasingly restrictive migration policies under the Trump administration.