Of Racism and Immigrants

The Dominican Republic is building a wall, and they are doing it for a very familiar reason.

The Dominican Republic will build a border fence at the border, specifically at the Mal Paso border point, in Jimaní, Independencia province.
...
At the beginning of this year, the Dominican Government also built a fence in the El Carrizal, Elías Piña community in the Elías Piña border province to try to make tax collection more efficient.
That decision generated a strong confrontation with shots and stones between Haitians and nationals in that area.

The Dominican military responded to an assault with stones launched by Haitian nationals. In fact, one Haitian was killed and another injured in the skirmish.

Any conservatives reading this is probably nodding their heads in agreement. The fence was a good idea.
Except that this story is not what it seems. You see, the phrase "tax collections" is code words for "forced bribes".
I lived in the DR for two years. Anyone that bothers to leave the resorts and go to the border regions will notice layers upon layers of military check points. They exist for one reason and one reason alone - to extort money from Haitians.
Imagine a kid in a uniform holding a machine gun, boarding a public bus and pulling anyone that looked Haitian off the bus. Gawd help the person that didn't have enough for a bribe.

Notice I said "looked Haitian", not "was Haitian".
Because the DR's policy in this regard is openly racist. This is instructive because they are merely one step ahead of the Republican Party.
Recall Donald Trump’s plan to end birthright citizenship by executive order. He failed because of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Almost every nation in the western hemisphere has birthright citizenship, but the DR has a loophole.

Under the Dominican Constitution, those born on Dominican soil were Dominican, even if their parents weren’t — unless the parent was “in transit” when the child was born. That exclusion dated back to the days of ships passing through. But well into the 20th century, it was being used to discriminate against Dominican citizens whose parents came from Haiti...
In 2004, a new immigration law was passed that said that the “in transit” provision of the constitution applied to the children of undocumented workers, regardless of how long the undocumented workers had been in the Dominican Republic. In 2007, the Central Electoral Board — Junta Central Electoral, or JCE — began applying the 2004 law retroactively, refusing to issue or renew identity documents to Dominicans of Haitian descent born before 2004.

The JCE didn’t do that all on its own. The United States helped, under the guise of helping the Caribbean nation modernize its record keeping and investigating fraud. Marselha Gonçalves Margerin, a human rights lawyer and advocate who works on the issue of stateless people in the Dominican Republic, said it was US money that helped the Dominican Republic revise its record keeping to better track its citizens and more effectively strip citizenship from people it determined had been born of undocumented parents.
In a 2010 report, the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights was critical of the US’s role.

This is a big deal, because this change in legal status that the U.S. assisted with ruined about 100,000 lives.
I bring this up for a specific reason.
That reason isn't that light-skinned black people can be just as racist as white people, although Dominicans have proven this to be true.
The reason also isn't that harsh immigration policies often appear racist because they are always xenophobic.
The reason why I bring this up is who benefits the most from harsh immigration policies.

Many wealthy Dominicans who profit wildly off the cheap labor supply are eager to have strict immigration laws in place, too—not because they want less immigration, but because they want a freer hand. Immigrants in the country illegally have no protection from workplace regulations and can be rounded up, deported, and replaced whenever convenient—including right before payday. (Sound familiar?)
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Alligator Ed's picture

I lived in the DR for two years. Anyone that bothers to leave the resorts and go to the border regions will notice layers upon layers of military check points. They exist for one reason and one reason alone - to extort money from Haitians.
Imagine a kid in a uniform holding a machine gun, boarding a public bus and pulling anyone that looked Haitian off the bus. Gawd help the person that didn't have enough for a bribe.

One of the prime justifications for building our Southern Wall is to prevent child-trafficking, drug-running, gang-importatation, etc. I support those reasons. But Dominica is already known to be a transit point for all of these malfeasances as well as gun-transmitting etc.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

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lotlizard's picture

@Alligator Ed  
http://infogalactic.com/info/Dominica

http://infogalactic.com/info/Dominican_Republic

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Alligator Ed's picture

@lotlizard Thank you for the education--now if only my few memory neurons can retain this.

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