The posted article misses a lot in this very sad story of one poor country scapegoating another even poorer country. There are two things going on: 1) deportation for undocumented Haitian workers; and 2) citizenship status of people born in the DR but of Haitian descent. On the latter issue, the NY Times states:
The tensions peaked in 2013 when a constitutional court moved to strip the citizenship of children born to Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic as far back as 1929. Many of the people affected by the ruling had lived their whole lives in the Dominican Republic and knew nothing of Haiti, not even the language.
An international outcry prompted the government to soften its stance somewhat with a law the next year. It promised citizenship to children whose births were in the nation’s civil registry, and a chance at nationalization for those not formally registered.
Advocates and international legal bodies said it still fell short. Anything less than full citizenship left these people stateless, belonging neither to their birthplace nor to their family’s homeland, they argued. But that group does not appear to be the target of the deportations, at least not directly.
On the deportation issue:
Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers are facing deportation from the Dominican Republic, the latest in a series of actions by the government that have cast a light on the country’s long-troubled relationship with its Haitian neighbors.
Undocumented workers in the Dominican Republic had until Wednesday to register their presence in the country, in the hope of being allowed to stay.
The government says nearly 240,000 migrant workers born outside the Dominican Republic have started the registration process. But there are an estimated 524,000 foreign-born migrant workers in the country — about 90 percent of whom are Haitian, according to a 2012 survey — leaving a huge population of migrants at risk of deportation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/world ... .html?_r=0
As usual, the Daily Rag (Kos) got the story wrong in an effort to over-dramatize the situation. There are real problems with how the DR is handling this, and the history of the island is complicated, but no one is served with the crappy reporting in the original story.
