The Dominican Republic’s foreign minister, Andres Navarro, said Friday that his nation is not prepared at this time to discuss with Haiti a new immigration policy that is leading to mass deportations of Haitians.
Navarro's statements have been taken as a response to the request made by Luis Almagro, the new secretary-general of the Organization of American States, who called on both nations to sit and talk, in order to solve the diplomatic row.
Navarro said that the main reason for refusing talks is that Haiti has ran an international campaign against the Dominican Republic over the measures. He added that it has been seeking for two years to discuss the immigration issue.
In 2013, Dominican President Danilo Medina announced a new special naturalization process for undocumented "foreigners" and their children born in the Dominican Republic. The law has caused a lot of controversy since it had the potential to strip Dominican citizenship from nearly 200,000 children born over the past 80 years to Haitian immigrants.
Since the new immigration policy was announced, some 41,200 Haitians have voluntarily returned to their country and nearly 17,000 have been deported.
Human rights activists say this law just shows the Dominican Republic's long history of discrimination against Haitians.
Navarro claimed that the government of Santo Domingo has always showed solidarity with Haitian people
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Both countries share the Caribbean island Hispaniola and have a long history of cooperation, however, circumstances in each country are very different.
Haiti is the poorest country in the region with a lack of infrastructure. Since the early 20th century, Haitians have made up the largest immigrant population in the Dominican Republic, which got larger after the 2010 earthquake that practically destroyed Haiti's infrastructure and plunged it into a deep economic and humanitarian crisis.
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