Vanel Rozier loads heavy sacks of gravel into the back of a waiting truck, his body moving in time with the Haitian kompa music playing from a co-worker’s phone. The air smells of sweat, dust, and roasted peanuts wafting from a nearby vendor.
Though deep in his work, Mr. Rozier is alert to his surroundings here in the heart of Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic. If the police show up, he knows the drill: Drop the sack, grab his backpack, and run.
“We’ve all done it,” he says, nodding at a handful of young men behind him shoveling gravel into large plastic sacks and passing them along. They all come from neighboring Haiti, which shares a border with the Dominican Republic on the island of Hispaniola. In this bustling corner of the city, they work from sunrise to sunset, seven days a week, without legal status.
Why We Wrote This
The Dominican Republic is deporting record numbers of Haitians, forcing them to endure catastrophic security, economic, and humanitarian crises at home. Can new, economically powerful Dominican voices shift the conversation?
An estimated half a million Haitians live in the Dominican Republic, seeking the stable life denied them at home, where armed gangs control most of the Haitian capital, state institutions have collapsed, poverty has deepened, and repeated natural disasters have left hundreds of thousands homeless.
Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader has made deportation of Haitians the centerpiece of his government policy, with an ambitious target – 10,000 deportations a week. Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent have been detained at hospitals while preparing for birth, while coming home from school, and for simply “looking Haitian.” In late June, the U.S. government announced it would end temporary protected status for Haitians in September, a move that is expected to increase deportations of Haitians from the United States as well.
More than 119,000 Haitians were expelled from the Dominican Republic between January and May. That marked a 71% increase over the same period last year, even if below the official target.
But for those who work with Haitians every day and depend on their labor, there’s a need for increased education here about Haitians’ vital role in society. The construction sector – Dominican Republic’s second-largest industry – is beginning to speak out, calling for visa programs or work authorization, as industry leaders say the workforce is predominantly made up of Haitian workers.
“Without Haitian labor, construction stops,” says Eliseo Cristopher, president of Copymecon, a Dominican confederation of small- and medium-sized construction enterprises.
He says companies are “very worried” about losing their workforce amid the mass deportations. “Dominicans are not interested in doing that kind of work,” he says of hauling cement and breaking ground under the tropical sun. Those in the construction sector estimate 80% of workers are Haitian.
“I do think it makes a difference” that employers are speaking up, says Bridget Wooding, a leading migration researcher and director of the Caribbean Migration and Development Observatory (OBMICA), based in Santo Domingo.
“It’s not just industry leaders – even the Agriculture Ministry has been speaking out. The president may use his economic and social dialogue to quietly shift course without losing face.”
“Promising change,” upping deportations
The focus on deportations from the Dominican Republic today has more to do with domestic politics than with Haitians, says Dr. Wooding.
“Right now, it’s the rising cost of living, and corruption,” she says. “This government came to power promising change … but it hasn’t convinced people that real reform is happening.”
Deportations are popular among voters. Some 89.2% of Dominicans – government supporters and opponents – approve of the policy, according to a recent poll.
Over the past year, the government has manned the Haitian border with 11,000 soldiers. Beginning in April, immigration agents, sometimes backed by the military, have conducted sweeps on buses, in markets, and around construction sites.
Mr. Rozier fled Les Cayes, in southern Haiti, after a 2021 earthquake devastated his city. His $60 a week wage as a manual laborer allows him to support his mother, father, sister, and brother – all of whom followed him across the border.
He has been caught up in sweeps and detained three times, he says, always on his way home from work. Each time, he secured his release by paying bribes to the police.
“Half a month’s wages,” he says of the price he has paid for his freedom.
Identity, sovereignty, and being “pro-Haitian”
Dominican officials insist their deportations comply with human rights standards. Amnesty International and the United Nations have called them discriminatory and in violation of international law. Haiti’s interim government compared them to “ethnic cleansing” at an emergency Organization of American States meeting last year.
Mr. Cristopher, the leader of a construction professional association, attracted fierce criticism for publicly demanding talks with the government about regularizing undocumented workers, “with access to social security and other protections of formal employment,” he says.
“People accuse me of being ‘pro-Haitian,’” he says. His phone “exploded with angry messages” after he voiced his position on a news program earlier this year.
“Being ‘pro-Haitian’ is a term for being unpatriotic, a betrayal of the homeland,” says Dominican human rights activist Elena Lorac, who believes more businesses should follow Mr. Cristopher’s example.
“Migration control is framed as protecting sovereignty,” she says, an approach that dates back to the Dominican Republic’s declaration of independence from Haiti in 1844.
Ever since, authorities have emphasized racial, cultural, and linguistic differences between Dominicans and Haitians, she says. “The government has spread this language [of betrayal] so widely that Haitians now live in fear of being reported by neighbors, fellow churchgoers, even teachers.”
Breaking down barriers
Still, where Dominicans and Haitians work side by side, sympathy and solidarity build ties.
Early every morning, before raids begin, Tomás Peña, who supervises a medium-sized construction company in Santo Domingo, picks up his Haitian colleagues in a van with tinted windows. He tries to make sure work assignments aren’t in busy, public areas.
“The only hours of the day I feel safe are when I’m working,” says one worker, a former engineering student from Haiti, who asks not to be named for his security.
He first arrived in Santo Domingo five years ago with a dream of finishing his studies. Gangs had stormed and shuttered his university in Port-au-Prince. But, unable to obtain a visa here, he was deported – several times.
When he finally made it back to Santo Domingo last December, Mr. Peña offered him a job.
For Mr. Peña, it’s about more than protecting good employees – it’s about being a good friend. Many Dominican employers have limited contact with their Haitian workers, he says, often because they’re on different ends of the labor spectrum.
“But my co-worker here for instance,” he says of the young engineer, “we work side by side. We talk every day,” which has shifted his perspective.
Mr. Peña laughs, embarrassed, recalling how he once repeated the same “bad things about Haiti and Haitians as everyone else. All I knew was what I saw on the news: poverty, crime, problems.”
Now he dreams of visiting Haiti one day.
As fear and distrust tighten their grip on the Haitian diaspora, Mr. Peña’s friendship has served as a reminder to some of his co-workers that there are Dominicans standing by them.
Sometimes, the young engineer from Haiti says, his uncertainty about when he might be detained becomes so overwhelming that he contemplates returning to Haiti on his own. In those moments, Mr. Peña reassures him.
“Stay with us,” Mr. Peña tells him. “We want you here.”
