Anti-Haitianism in the Dominican Republic: A Biopolitical Turn?
Authors: Bridget Wooding and Samuel Martinez. Constitutional Court ruling 168 of September 23, 2013 has often been portrayed as a decree that expels all unauthorized Haitian residents from the Dominican Republic while stripping citizenship from those born in the country to Haitian parents. The evidence, however, suggests that the ruling seeks less the territorial exclusion of Haitians and their descendants than their incorporation into the Dominican political economy as second-class citizens. The article argues that the ruling marks a shift from a seigneurial regime to a biopolitical mode of governing minority groups through legal and information technologies.
Constitutional Court ruling 168 of September 23, 2013, handed down by the Dominican Republic's highest constitutional authority, has often been portrayed as a decree that expels all unauthorized Haitian residents from the country while stripping citizenship from those born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents. Taken together, however, the evidence suggests that the ruling seeks less the territorial exclusion of Haitians and their descendants than their incorporation into the Dominican political economy as second-class citizens, immobilized for as long as convenient within a hereditary underclass.
After the ruling, the old excesses of intimidation and mass expulsion continued and possibly worsened. More chilling still was the addition of a recent, legalized and bureaucratized form of social exclusion. The objectives remain clearly anti-Haitian. Yet what is being sought is not the visible expulsion of descendants of Haitians or their confinement behind barbed wire, but rather their invisible discouragement from accumulating the human capital, economic credentials, and citizenship documents needed to aspire to middle-class comfort and respectability. The ruling therefore signals a shift from a seigneurial regime to a biopolitical mode of governing minority groups based on new legal technologies and on systems for storing and retrieving information. In this way, the new biopolitical mode of anti-Haitian exclusion fits better than the previous one with more varied and flexible forms of incorporating Haitian labor into the neoliberal economy.
Keywords: Dominican Republic, human rights, minority rights, migrant rights, biopolitics, Dominico-Haitians, Haitian immigrants.
Publication date: First half of 2017
Format - Size: PDF - 18 MB
URL: http://www.migracionydesarrollo.org