Statelessness in the Dominican Republic: A new turn in Anti-Haitianism Bridget Wooding, Observatory Caribbean Migrants The “Sentencia 168”—a ruling of the 23rd of September 2013, by the highest court of the Dominican Republic, the Tribunal Constitucional—has been commonly represented as a decree expelling all unauthorized Haitian residents from the Dominican Republic and stripping citizenship from Dominican-born Haitian descendants. However, the evidence is that the Sentencia does not seek the territorial exclusion of Haitians and Haitian descendants so much as their second-class inclusion into the Dominican political economy, cementing Haitian descendants for as long as is convenient within a hereditary underclass. Following the Sentencia, old-style “excesses” have continued, but there has been a newly legalistic and bureaucratically-enforced social exclusionism. The aims are incontestably anti-Haitian. Yet what is sought is neither to expel Haitian descendants nor to confine them visibly behind barbed wire fences, but to deter them invisibly from accumulating the human capital, economic credentials, and citizenship documents needed to aspire to middle class comforts and respect. These changes form part of a larger “securitization” of civil registry records and identity documents. In sum, this biopolitical mode of anti-Haitian exclusionism fits the neoliberal economy’s more varied and more flexible forms of incorporation of Haitian labor. The Context In the decades before the 1990s, unknown thousands of Dominican-born people of Haitian ancestry gained official citizenship when Haitian fathers registered their children’s births using temporary identification cards issued to seasonal sugarcane workers. Obtaining Dominican citizenship has always been made difficult by anti-Black racism but was for decades facilitated by compliant civil registry officials. These local-level officials approved the issuance of tens of thousands of valid birth certificates to the Dominicanborn children of Haitian nationals, even though the latter often bore no proof of identity other than the “temporary” identity cards (carnets temporeros or fichas) issued to seasonal workers by the sugar companies upon arrival from Haiti. Electoral politics and the creation of small pockets of grateful voters/political clients on the sugar plantations undoubtedly impinged. Beginning in the 1980s, prospects for sugar’s future went from buoyant to depressed, and official permissiveness was replaced by growing restrictiveness. By 1990, evidence had emerged that Dominican-born children of Haitian ancestry were being denied birth certificates under the pretext that the Dominican Constitution, from 1929 forward, exempted the children of persons “in transit” from the jus soli right to http://community.apsanet.org/migrationcitizenship/home 21