In addition, she understood that due to the political party change, she was going to lose her job when the schools eventually reopened in 2021. In Clara’s words: “Sometimes they call to have me go clean, but you know it’s because of the political parties. Sometimes we have to go clean, but after December is over someone else will come in to work.” Several study participants spoke of the inconveniences caused by a lack of transportation. Market vendors’ work was disrupted for months due in part to the closure of the Dominican-Haitian border and cancellation of the bi-weekly border markets. Maxime, a 36-year-old Haitian migrant registered in the PNRE, described the negative impact with regards to his plantain business: “We held out for a long time, like 4 months without being able to leave the house. Then they gave you a chance with a permission slip. In the truck we’d go out to sell on market days, but we spent about 4 months sitting there at home just eating.” Benito, a Dominican of Haitian descent from Group B2, who did not apply for Law 169-14, echoes the same difficulty when highlighting that: “COVID paralyzed everything. There was no transport or work. If you cut the root vegetables, oranges, whatever, there was no way to take it to the city where it is sold. And that had us out of work.” d) Access to education The interviews show that access to education is limited for this population, with varying situations according to documents held and discretion exercised by school directors in certain cases, prior to the pandemic. Although the Dominican authorities tried to address access issues for public school students during the prolonged school closures, few people have been able to continue their children’s or their own studies, during the pandemic. Exceptionally, Margarita, who has never had problems with her papers and holds a degree in education, was able to arrange for continuity of her daughter’s studies. Margarita reports that: “They sent the class to her on WhatsApp and I helped my daughter in order for her to finish the school year. We did the homework together and sent it back to the teacher.” But for most of the people interviewed, the authorities’ television and radio options were compromised by difficulties accessing electricity and/or the internet. Some parents did not understand the educational options very well, in part due to language obstacles for migrants, nor did they necessarily feel in a position to help their children due to limitations in their own education. Existing inequalities are expected to widen, as public schools did not reopen in 2020 and as of April 2021 the situation remains uncertain. No clear guidance regarding the plans for reopening of private schools has been issued either. e) Social protection programs Well before the pandemic, scholars had begun to study the issue of the possible exclusion of marginalized populations from innovative social protection programs. In the case at hand, Eve Hayes highlights the possible deficiencies in terms of legal identity practices, promoted by the World Bank, the United Nations system and by the Inter-American Development Bank, IADB (Hayes 2021). She cautions that policies that encourage en masse registration of native populations descended from migrants can also bring up the thorny issue of nationality, destabilizing long-standing identities of people with vested rights to the nationality of the country where they were born. This trend towards the exclusion of certain populations from social protection, which Hayes portrays in the case of the DR, could be aggravated under the pandemic, as demonstrated in many interviews conducted as part of this study. Both migrants and stateless people who lack Dominican documentation have been left out of the expanded social protection programs that the government rolled out to mitigate the impact of the pandemic. Economic measures have mainly consisted of economic stimulus packages to mitigate the loss of income for companies and individuals, with the aim of protecting employment. Companies have seen tax requirements flexibilized as well. Programs targeting individuals include income protection subsidies to supplement for- 24 Research Brief: COVID-19 Impacts on Haitian Migrants and their Descendants on the Southern Border of the D.R.