maining true to the letter of the Sentencia 168/13; second, mitigating the Sentencia’s massive potential for social disruption and legal conflict; while, third, drawing a bright line in time past by which no further children of Haitians without legal right of residence will be accepted into the Dominican nation. As noted, Law 169-14 conceptualizes people born in-country to irregularlyresident foreign parents not as Dominicans but as foreign nationals. The Law divides these people into two groups. The first, Group A, are those who possessed official Dominican identity documents. They would be granted Dominican nationality, effectively because the state recognized a responsibility toward them for having committed the administrative error of registering them, and not because they are Dominicans by right of being born on Dominican soil. The second group, Group B comprises those who lack any kind of identity document. These people the Law classifies as foreigners in their own country of birth and obligates to follow a naturalization process in order to obtain Dominican citizenship, which many had previously assumed to be theirs all along. The Law immediately burdened rights liberals in Dominican civil society with a difficult choice: cooperate, by helping the Dominicans who stood at risk of becoming stateless persons to present solid legal claims to citizenship; or keep the moral high ground by repudiating the whole process as blatantly anti-Haitian. Civil society organizations saw a valuable opportunity within the Law 169 for reducing the vulnerability of those people in Group B, who had no identity documents and hence were particularly at risk of statelessness. For these human rights defenders, the Law’s silver lining was that it gave visibility to the plight of those tens of thousands of Dominican-born Haitian descendants whose birth had never been registered. Nevertheless, among both groups actual outcomes have been mixed, with human rights defenders pointing to inadequacies of the Law (especially for Group B) and the timid uneven application for Group A. What the future holds Lastly, it could be argued that what is happening in the Dominican Republic is akin to the troubled distinction between Us and Them, Migrant and Citizen which migration and citizenship scholar Bridget Anderson theorizes in her acclaimed text Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Controls (OUP, 2013). Her work explores how borders create social, political and economic relations and argues that these are not solely the concern of migrants. The exclusion of migrants helps define the privileges and limitations of citizenship, and close attention to the border (physical and metaphorical) reveals as much about how we make sense of ourselves. Her book explores how the migrant is a normative as well as a legal construct which is deeply problematic for technocratic policies. Immigration status is not only about legal technicalities, but it is about the status in the sense of value, worth and honour, that is membership of, as she puts it, “a community of value”. Thus Us and Them draws attention to the fact that the struggle for justice, inclusion and human rights cannot be won – or not exclusively – in the legal http://community.apsanet.org/migrationcitizenship/home 26