Dominicans Slam Government Hypocrisy as OAS Mission Concludes

As tens of thousands of Haitian descendents face deportation from the Dominican Republic, delegates from the Organization of American States looking into the regularization plan forcing massive out-migration wrapped up their two-day mission in the capital Santo Domingo Saturday, Prensa Latina reported.

OAS delegation chief Francisco Guerrero indicated that the OAS should maintain contact with Dominican civil society organizations that attended meetings in the capital, including human rights, women’s, and Haitian-Dominican organizations. Guerrero also said a report on the OAS findings will be released after the mission.

Civil society presented its views to #OAS mission in #DomRep and #Haiti pic.twitter.com/lford5yJCR

— OAS (@OAS_official) July 11, 2015

#OAS mission in #DomRep & #Haiti holds meeting with President @juntacentral @RRosarioMarquez pic.twitter.com/AppHGCeTW4

— OAS (@OAS_official) July 10, 2015

OAS delegates will visit the Dominican-Haitian border after concluding business in the capital.

The delegation comes as a Dominican organization slammed the Dominican government, its traditional political class, andits business elite for exploiting the issue of migration in order to scapegoat Haitian workers as responsible for the country’s problems.

“The real enemy of our people is this system that keeps them in poverty,” said Juan Miguel Perez of the Dominican organization known as Camina DR, adding that the dominant economic model, corruption, impunity, and policies that favor private interests benefit a small minority at the suffering of many.

RELATED: Xenophobia in Dominican Republic - Interview on the Global African

​“We accuse the Dominican business class of maintaining permanent hypocrisy regarding the reality of immigrant workers, paying them, just like Dominican workers, miserable salaries,” said Perez.

Perez’ organization condemned the long-standing anti-immigration, racist, and xenophobic policies of the government that criminalize poor migrants and called on Dominican society to create a common front against what they say is a “ruling regime of repression, abuse, and inequality for the poor,” regardless of nationality.

Update: Now it is 41,260 that have abandoned the DR or been deported according to DR immigration services #Haiti pic.twitter.com/FN8Hgmee5u

— Etant Dupain (@gaetantguevara) July 11, 2015

Dominican Republic is home to about half a million stateless Haitians, stripped of Dominican citizenship in a 2013 court decision that retroactively denied citizenship to the children of undocumented migrants dating back to 1929.

​A government-imposed deadline for undocumented people to register with Dominican immigration authorities that came down last month  set a time limit on Haitians' stay in the Dominican Republic. With few permits granted, the regularization plan was essentially a mass-deportation order for Haitians and many Dominicans of Haitian descent.

Less than 2 percent of Haitian immigrants have been granted Dominican citizenship rights through the regularization program, according to a report by U.S. News. Some 40,000 Haitians have already been pushed out of the Dominican Republic, though the government insists they have left voluntarily.

Les autorités dominicaines parlent de rapatriement volontaire assisté, alors qu’il s’agit de déportations souvent violentes.

— Michel J. Martelly (@MichelJMartelly) July 3, 2015

“Dominican authorities speak of voluntary assisted repatriation, while it’s often violent deporations.”

While the immediate root of the current crisis is the 2013 citizenship stripping that instantly pushed hundreds of thousands of Haitian-Dominicans into a precarious statelessness, the underlying tensions between the neighboring countries on the shared Caribbean island of Hispaniola run much deeper.

RELATED: The Dominican Republic and Haiti: A Shared Legacy of Conditions

​Under the Dominican dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in 1937, thousands of Haitians were massacred in a government-sponsored mass killing of the Haitian community. Even some dark-skinned Dominicans were targeted in the anti-Haitian ethnic purge known as the Parsley Massacre.

As close neighbors, the Dominican Republic and Haiti share a similar history of colonization, occupation, and U.S. domination. Since as far back as the late 1800s, hundreds of thousands of Haitians have crossed the border fleeing violence and poverty to seek a better life in the Dominican Republic.

​RELATED: Bill Fletcher Jr. looks at what is fueling anti-immigraiton hysteria in Dominican Republic on The Global African