- The main streets of Santo Domingo
become a party scene during Carnaval weekend.
The crowds are counting, in English,
for the live music to start.
During Carnaval, Dominicanos celebrate their independence,
not from Spain, but from neighboring Haiti,
which ruled the entire island during the mid-1800s.
But behind the festivities,
an immigration-related crisis has its own countdown.
- Dominican Republic is known for its beaches
and lovely bachata songs,
but there's another reality, of course.
- Robin Guittard is Amnesty International's
campaigner for the Caribbean Region.
- We have been working very intensively
in this country since 2013,
following the Constitutional Court judgment
which provoked an important human rights crisis,
and created the largest stateless population
in the Americas region.
- Haitian migration has been motivated by
poverty, political instability and natural disasters.
- Today, we know from the only survey
that's been carried out that Haitian migration
forms 87% of the total immigrant population here.
- That's Bridget Wooding, director of OBMICA,
the Caribbean Observatory of Migrants.
Like Guittard, she observes that the predicaments
that face undocumented Haitians last for generations.
Those who are born from undocumented parents
are not considered citizens according to Dominican regulations,
leaving thousands of people stateless.
After international pressure,
the government created a temporary program
to identify and register undocumented immigrants
and stateless people.
Some of them did register and get an ID,
but others could not make it since they can't prove
their identity or origins.
- At the moment they don't have access to too many rights,
with the exception very timidly of social security,
so there's still big challenges for the Dominican government.
- It is easy to hear Haitian Creole
a few steps away from Santo Domingo's downtown,
in Petit Haiti, where all sorts of things are sold on the streets.
The neighborhood is the heart of a Haitian community,
and just a few blocks from there,
Antonio Pol Emil heads the Dominican-Haitian Cultural Center.
Pol Emil is a lawyer,
and used to work as an elected official in the government,
but his Dominican documents were revoked.
- The authorities question anyone whose documents
have what they call "weird last names."
Just by the way my last names sound,
they can tell that I have a foreign descent.
- Pol Emil's Dominican passport was seized
while he tried to renew it last year.
He was born in Dominican Republic from Haitian parents,
but he can't fully prove his identity, becoming stateless.
- Conservatism here targets immigrants,
and there's no distinction between them and their children.
- Pol Emil says some Haitians fear racial profiling
and deportations in a society
where disparagement of Haitians is common.
But Dominican conservatives and nationalists
oppose citizenship for the migrants and stateless.
- What we get from Haiti is not a migration or an exodus,
it is an occupation.
- Pellegrín Castillo is the vice president
of Fuerza Nacional Progresista,
one of the main political parties in the Dominican Republic.
Castillo says that he sympathizes
with Donald Trump's idea of building border walls.
- We've been in Arizona
and learned how the Nogales port of entry operates.
We know that a border with security controls
is what really helps coexistence.
- Like other conservatives,
he thinks that Haitian migrants are taking jobs
that impoverished Dominicans deserve.
But others hope that the Dominican Republic's approach
to immigration doesn't plant a bad seed
in Trump's administration.
For the Transborder Unit, Rodrigo Cervantes, KJZZ News, Santo Domingo.
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