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Dominican-Haitians are struggling not only for legal citizenship but also for cultural
citizenship, for a more widespread recognition that they are part of the Dominican
Republic and so that, legally, they are part of this country. Cultural citizenship is a
broad expression created by legal scholars and social scientists in order to describe
those undeclared assumptions about individuals who, in terms of race, ethnic
affiliation and class, belong wholly to the nation, and to define their fundamental
identity. Exclusion from cultural citizenship can have negative social, economic and
psychological consequences for those who are internally colonized or the
underprivileged ethnic-racial minorities who are relegated to an enduring situation as
second class citizens or who are totally denied citizenship.
Well-known State leaders of opinion are opposed to the rights of Haitian immigrants
and tend to speak of Haitians as an undifferentiated mass, making no distinction
between Dominican-Haitians and Haitian citizens, suggesting and, at times, affirming
explicitly that those born in the Dominican Republic are as Haitian as their parents
who were born in Haiti. However, social research suggests that Dominican-Haitians
are culturally Dominican, are loyal to the Dominican Republic, and seek to obtain
legal citizenship of the country in which they were born and the only one they know.
Late registration is often the only way that Dominican-Haitians have of obtaining an
official birth certificate. Many Haitians in the Dominican Republic decide to give birth
to their children at home, instead of going to a medical center, due to lack of
financial resources and the difficulty of having access to adequate means of
transportation from remote rural settlements, or to the fear that hospital personnel
or police agents will report them, since many of them are in the country illegally. In
recent years, hospital personnel have denied birth certifications even to Haitians
born in hospitals.
The recruitment of Haitians is frequently permitted and even assisted by the
Dominican police because very few Haitians would dare to enter a country for the
first time where they know no one, do not speak the language, and have no
guarantee of employment.
Haitians and their children born into poverty in the bateyes are willing to work for
lower wages than those that Dominicans would accept for dangerous work which
demands considerable effort.
The desire and also the tendency to return to their homes in Haiti has been
especially strong among the Haitian immigrants and nine out of every ten men who
migrate to the Dominican Republic to cut cane return home within two years. The
Haitians who remain in the Dominican Republic do so because they have formed a
family there.
Moreover, in the context of globalization where the flow of financial and cultural
transactions involves an increasing demand for displacement from one country to
another, the marginalization of those who are stateless increases. The ability to
move to another country is not a luxury, but a necessity for hundreds of thousands
of Dominicans seeking better living conditions; but this is an opportunity from which
stateless Dominican-Haitians are excluded, since they do not have the necessary
documentation.
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