Latin American Research Review 595 concentrations of Dominico-Haitians (Corbacho and Osorio Rivas 2012, 29; Riveros 2014). Impeding matters further were discriminatory practices among civil registrars, who often demanded bribes, requested extra-legal parental documents, and employed other arbitrary criteria for exclusion, such as Haitian surnames and accents (Riveros 2014, 69–70; Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 2015, 109, 112, 143). If these considerations made timely birth registration complicated, obtaining a delayed certificate proved even more challenging.10 The combined result of these practices was an exceedingly low rate of birth registration, especially among older cohorts born and raised in bateyes.11 The story of codified exclusion begins: 2004–2005 A key development that pushed the documentation-citizenship linkage to the fore was a new framework of social protection that the Dominican government sought to implement in the early 2000s. Promoted by the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, conditional cash transfers made their way across Latin America in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Everywhere, acceptance into these income-support programs depended on the state’s recognition of applicants as citizens. In the DR, the process of collecting information on people’s national origin and documentary status engendered a painful political reckoning over who was a citizen (Hayes de Kalaf 2019). A problem that became acutely evident—and that served as an official basis of exclusion—was just how many Dominico-Haitians had never received Dominican birth certificates and therefore could not readily prove legal citizenship. Even some who possessed them were questioned by authorities. The JCE was given total discretion in identifying and defining “irregularities” (Hayes de Kalaf 2019, 107), which often resulted in codifying the exclusion of Dominican-born people of Haitian ancestry. Notably, elsewhere in Latin America many poor people seeking to enroll in cash transfer programs lacked documentation, but most other countries took committed and proactive steps to try to register them (Hunter and Brill 2016; Hunter 2019).12 Concurrent with the expansion of document-dependent social welfare benefits, social unrest was growing and a political storm brewing. The 2004 presidential election occurred amid an economic crisis in the country and a violent coup in Haiti that caused thousands to flee across the border to seek asylum (Ribando 2005, 3). Candidates exploited antiimmigrant anger for political gain, including the eventual victor Leonel Fernández (president from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2004 to 2012), who referred to people of Haitian ancestry as a “threat to national security.” A new migration law was passed in this cauldron of nationalist politics. Law 285-2004 stipulated that newly arrived Haitian migrants, as well as those long settled in the country, would henceforth be classified as “nonresidents” (República Dominicana 2004). Additionally, all nonresidents past and future would be considered “in transit” indefinitely, challenging the understanding of that constitutional phrase as meaning ten days or less. Law 285-2004 thus raised the question of whether jus soli citizenship would apply in the future to children born in the 10 The Dominican Republic requires the physical presence of the father when registering a child if the parents are not married (UNICEF 2016b, 24) or if more than sixty days have passed since the birth. Late registration also comes with a financial penalty. 11 A 1994 survey estimated that half of all residents in bateyes lacked any record of being born in the DR (Riveros 2014, 69). Later surveys estimated that between 22 percent and 25 percent of batey residents lacked birth documents (CESDEM 2008, 19; CESDEM 2015, 6). 12 Even countries with low bureaucratic capacity such as Bolivia and Peru have engaged in successful outreach, including conducting mobile registration drives, bringing registration services to primary schools and local health clinics, and employing registrars who speak Indigenous languages to interact with their communities. Readily accepting baptismal certificates as evidence of parentage and place and date of birth has been a widespread practice in incorporating previously unregistered people into the civil registry. Relaxing fees and deadlines and not demanding official ID documents of parents to register children have also been crucial to break intergenerational exclusion. https://doi.org/10.1017/lar.2022.48 Published online by Cambridge University Press