How can we define the Haitians living in the Dominican Republic?

In the recent global politics we have heard about refugees just about every day. But Haitian refugees is not a common group that we hear about, it is usually referencing the millions of refugees in the Middle East region. Yet, there are over 200,000 stateless people, most with some form of Haitian ancestry, in the Dominican Republic now. So how do we define these Haitian Dominicans? The UNHCR defined refugees as someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. This definition was created in the UN Human Rights Convention in 1951 in Geneva and seems to hit all possible reasons for a person to seek asylum in another country. But searching for the basic numbers of Haitian refugees is very difficult to find and no statistics show up. Since we know there are thousands of Haitians living in the DR, the question of how we define this group of people arises.

Michel Agier is a French ethnologist with a focus on cultures and their historical development. His book, Managing the Undesirables, takes a look at the various victims of displacement around the world and the different forms of displacement. His first chapter, "Refugees, Displaced, Rejected: The Itinerary of the Stateless", is very informative and defines the various forms of displacement that many people are forced to live with and face. The easiest term to define is stateless(ness). The idea of a stateless person is an umbrella term for those people that are considered refugees, forcefully displaced, internally displaced or illegals. Agier looks at how these displaced populations are defined and how those definitions have become realities.

Agier references Hannah Arendt, a very popular political theorist that held very personal ties to displaced people. Statelessness is defined by Arendt as "the nation-state, incapable of providing a law for those who had lost the protection of a national government". She also reasons the root of this problem is at the nation-state level because these countries are unable to provide the necessary protection and recognition of their people, so we must change the structure and definition of a nation-state in order to attack the global refugee crisis. A person becomes stateless in the process of fleeing from their country because it forces the person to give up their citizenship. Pierre Bourdieu, another philosopher and anthropologist referenced by Agier, defines stateless broadly as an "individual with no exercise of citizenship, with no 'right to have rights'" (Agier 18). Both of these definitions for statelessness can be perfectly applied to the situation in the Dominican Republic and help us understand what this Haitian population is now forced to endure.

The UNHCR tries to keep accurate numbers of the global stateless population. Agier cites their numbers in 2011 for "victims of forced displacement" as 50 million, those strictly refugees as 10-18 million and approximately 25-30 million internally displaced persons (IDPs). These numbers are astounding, and unfortunately are not as accurate as they could be and definitely do not account for all the stateless in the world, which can be referenced by those not declared, or the illegals.

Since the 1951 Convention, the list of exiles has grown as new disasters have arisen. Now the various NGOs, international agencies and public authorities recognize the longer list refugees, displaced, disaster victims, evacuees, migrants, asylum seekers, rejected, expelled, repatriated, returned and more. Because of these new terms and ways of defining these exiles, the movement of bodies is more complex and the ways of governing our borders and countries are in effect impacted as well. This is one of the ways Agier has analyzed the evolution of the term of stateless and refugees since their inception at the convention. The most concerning change in these terms over the years is not how the terms have changed border politics, but state politics and how they are able to expel and keep out a population with greater force now

This legality of moving for these exiles is what the Haitians on Hispaniola face the most because the Dominican government has created material means for controlling their population and their immigration. Because of this movement and the authority held by the Dominican government, we can call the current population of Haitian Dominicans as "rejected". Since this group is now recognized, Agier asserts they are now illegal instead of exiles and stigmatized as illegal immigrants without papers.

Overall, the purpose of Agier's chapter was to focus on the immoral and how in present day we have a different sense of responsibility and rejection that is impacting a major part of the global population. I agree with Agier that the act of naming and classifying is very political and this narrative that is created in the process by naming these Haitian Dominicans illegals attributes to their broader racist discourse. I think we could define these exiles as refugees because there is great political unrest in Haiti, and this group may not feel accepted in their own country. But overall, they do represent a rejected population of asylum seekers and although they are labeled now, that does not mean they do not deserve the same respect we give our fellow citizens in our respective countries.