Chapter 2 The Right to Nationality and Judgment TC/0168/13 of the Constitutional Court | 55 98. 99. farm workers to do the cutting and clearing during the sugar cane harvest. 94 This was how the sector’s demand for cheap labor was satisfied. 95 The migration of Haitian workers was a decisive factor in lowering production costs by hiring cheap labor, thereby producing profits for the sugar cane industry. From the start, the use of Haitian labor to work on the sugar cane plantations “was driven by the economic advantages of using foreign laborers; their language barriers, the nationality-based discrimination they experienced, and their reliance on the employer for such basic services as housing, made them easy prey for intensive labor exploitation.” 96 The demand for foreign labor to work the sugar cane plantations was a principal reason why Haitian migrants became the largest foreign-born community in the Dominican Republic. 97 The majority of these migrants were taken to live in “bateyes”, the term used to refer to the settlements located on sugar cane plantations. This population includes persons born in Haiti who migrated to the Dominican Republic and as many as three or four generations of descendants born on Dominican soil. 98 At the time of the 1935 census, there were an estimated 52,657 Haitians in the Dominican Republic; 11,586 worked and lived outside the sugar industry. 99 At that time, Haitian workers were hired by the mills through direct talks with the Haitian government. For its part, the Dominican Republic issued immigration permits and required that the workers return to Haiti once the harvest was over. 100. Between September 28 and October 8, 1937, the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo ordered a massacre in which thousands of Haitians died. The scene of the massacre was mainly the border provinces, such that the event is known as the “Dominicanization of the border.” Trujillo gave orders to track down and kill any Haitian on Dominican territory; the only ones spared with those working at U.S.owned sugar mills. The massacre was clearly racist and anti-Haitian. The soldiers were ordered to kill anyone who did not have his or her identification papers or who was assumed to be Haitian because of his or her physical appearance or command of the Spanish language. 100 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 See, inter alia, Veras, Ramón Antonio, Contratos y reclutamientos de braceros: entradas clandestinas o repatriación. 1992, p. 110; OBMICA (Natalia Riveros), Estado de la cuestión de la población de los bateyes dominicanos en relación a la documentación. Dominican Republic, 2014, p. 18. See, Coria M., Elba Y., “Estudio Migratorio de Dominican Republic”, at Instituto Centroamericano de Estudios Sociales y Desarrollo (INCEDES) and Sin Fronteras IAP (Coord.), Estudio Comparativo de la Legislación y Políticas Migratorias en Centroamérica, México y Dominican Republic. Sin Fronteras IAP: Mexico, 2011, p. 560. OBMICA (Natalia Riveros), p. 19. According to the First Population Census, conducted in 1920, there were an estimated 47,780 foreign nationals in the Dominican Republic, who represented some 3% of the total population. Of those foreign nationals, an estimated 28,258 were Haitians, who accounted for 59.1% of the foreign-born population in the Dominican Republic. Some 30% of this population lived in the sugar bateyes. OBMICA (Natalia Riveros), Estado de la cuestión de la población de los bateyes dominicanos en relación a la documentación. Dominican Republic, 2014, p. 15. OBMICA (Natalia Riveros), p. 23. There are no official figures on the victims of the massacre, since the killings began in secret and was not reported by the media. However, estimates range from 1,000 to 30,000 victims. According to Dominican historian Frank Moya Pons, the victims numbered 18,000; Joaquín Balaguer, former president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights | IACHR