Détails

Catégorie : What's up Little Haiti

Création : 10 juin 2015

 Hundreds make final bids to stay in Canada after deportation hold lifted

VERITY STEVENSON

MONTREAL : The Globe and Mail - Ulrick Lafleur reaches into a brown envelope and gently pulls out a large folded piece of paper from the top of a pile of immigration forms. On official Haitian state letterhead with muted lettering, as if the printer needed ink, it informs Mr. Lafleur that his 49-year-old son, Nazaire, was shot to death and that his body was found on the street on May 12. It contains technicalities – his feet were pointing south, and his head north – but no condolences.

Mr. Lafleur is one of 3,500 people in Canada – 3,200 Haitians and 300 Zimbabweans – who were affected when the federal government lifted a hold on deportations to their home countries in December, deeming the situation in Haiti and Zimbabwe to be stable. Those without status were given six months to apply for residency on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.

Hundreds raced to submit the applications by the June 1 deadline. Some will be granted permanent residency and some will be eventually removed from Canada.

For others who have been in the country for years, it’s their second or third application to stay in Canada. Prior rejections and the thought of it happening again have discouraged many from filing the application and they have gone underground.

The moratorium on deportations went into effect for Zimbabwe in 2002 and for Haiti in 2004.

In 2002, many people fled Zimbabwe because of political unrest after Robert Mugabe was re-elected as President.

Two years later, in Haiti, a coup d’état removed president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, creating years of instability. Then, in 2010, an earthquake hit the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince, killing more than 200,000 people.

Haitians and Zimbabweans in Canada claim violence and unrest still plague their countries.

A travel advisory for Haiti on the Canadian government’s website, last updated on May 22, says, “Crime rates are high and the security situation is unpredictable.”

Quebec Immigration had counted only 500 applications for residency on humanitarian and compassionate grounds as of May, prompting its minister, Kathleen Weil, and community organizations to appeal to the federal government to grant an extra three months.

It costs $550 per person and 20 hours to fill out the humanitarian and compassionate demand for residency.

“I am desolate,” said Mr. Lafleur, who was denied refugee and residency applications in 2007 and 2010.

If he had attended his son’s funeral in Haiti, he would not have been able to come back to Canada, where he has lived for the past seven years, because of his lack of status here.

But he said he would not want to stay in Haiti, either. “I have nothing there. My house was destroyed by the earthquake, and now my son is dead,” he said in an interview.

Poignant tales have emerged from Haitians who are deploring the decision that may send them back to Haiti, where they say it’s not safe.

For William Antoine, a father of two with one on the way, this is his fourth time applying and his eighth year in Canada. He fears being separated from his children who were – and will be – born in Canada.

“We’re really worried,” he said last week outside the Citizenship and Immigration Canada office in Montreal, where a protest was held. “We work and pay for our children’s education – they’re the ones who could really contribute to Canadian society. Who knows? [One of them] could be prime minister one day.”

Jean Enor Goin, who was vocal about his story at the protest, fled Haiti in 2007 after he was stabbed for being gay. For years, he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder because of the incident.

“I am so upset [because of the end of the moratorium], but I love it here in Canada. I have a boyfriend, friends, I work here. I don’t want to leave,” he said.

Despite calls from several political parties to extend the deadline, the Immigration Department stood firmly by the June 1 date.

“It should come as no surprise, not to the Haitians nor to anyone else, that these temporary measures are coming to an end, because we announced it on Dec. 1,” Immigration Minister Chris Alexander said last month in the House of Commons in response to Quebec Liberal MP Emmanuel Dubourg, who brought up the demands for a delay.

“If Minister Weil would like to open other avenues towards permanent residence, she can use Quebec’s programs to do so,” Mr. Alexander said.

The Quebec government has spent $180,000 for five community organizations, including Maison d’Haiti Montréal, to help with completing the forms, which would otherwise require a lawyer. Quebec is home to 90 per cent of Canada’s Haitian population of 137,995.

In response to a request for comment by The Globe and Mail, an Immigration Department spokesperson copy-pasted Mr. Alexander’s response in the Commons and another said: “For those who submit an application on H&C grounds within six months of the TSR being lifted, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) will defer their removal pending a final decision on their H&C application.”

Mr. Dubourg, who is of Haitian descent, said the minister’s response to him in Parliament was surprising. “I’d say it floored me even, the shortness of his reply,” he said over the phone.

While politicians are asking for more time, the Non-Status Action Committee is advocating for all Haitians and Zimbabweans without status to be granted residency.

Serge Bouchereau, a spokesman for the committee, said he believes that the timing is a strategic appeal by the Conservatives before the fall election to what he called an increasing right-wing sentiment in the world. He thinks that they will move to deport the Haitians and Zimbabweans quietly at the end of the summer, when people are on vacation and then have their eyes on the election campaign.

Regarding the small number of applications submitted to date, Mr. Bouchereau said many feel anguish over the thought of a stranger looking at their file being responsible for their fate. “Haitians are proud people. They work hard at jobs many Canadians don’t typically fill; they don’t use employment insurance most of the time, and they pay taxes.”

A friend of Mr. Bouchereau’s, Johnny St. Paul, 51, took on extra security guard shifts, sometimes amounting to 16-hour days, to pay for the application. Most of the money he makes goes to pay for chemotherapy for the mother of one of his two sons who lives in the United States. His demand for refugee status was rejected when he first arrived in 2012.

Back home, he has an undergraduate law degree under his belt, but he said he had to leave before he could continue his career in constitutional law because he was repeatedly threatened for his outspoken political beliefs.

“My dream,” he said, his voice growing louder, “is that my two sons [one is in Haiti and the other in the United States] come to Canada and get an education here.”

Hundreds of sugarcane workers march to Haiti embassy as legalization deadline nears

Santo Domingo.- Hundreds of sugarcane workers marched to Haiti’s Embassy in the Dominican Republic, as the deadline to register for the government’s regularization plan looms, listin.com.do reports.

The protesters demand the documents required to register for the Foreigners Regularization Plan which ends on June 17.

A commission headed by sugarcane workers union coordinator in sugarcane villages (bateyes) Jesus Núñez was received by Haiti Embassy official Fritz Douge, who said Haiti ambassador Daniel Supplice would meet with the workers next Wednesday, according to the outlet.

After leaving the embassy Núñez said although the hour wasn’t specified, was told he will be called to coordinate the meeting.

He also announced another visit Monday morning to the Interior and Police Ministry, where he was told that a special solution would be found to the case of cane workers, but have yet to receive a reply.

The sugarcane workers, mostly elderly, said without them there’s no sugar and face a desperate situation, because the Haitian government doesn’t care about their immigration status in the country.

Tourism: Opening of the "Hilton Garden Inn Haiti" in the beginning of 2017

Announced on April 10th, 2014, the Hilton Garden Inn hotel plans to open its doors at the beginning of 2017, according to Karla Visconti, Director of communication for Caribbean and Latin America Hilton Worldwide.

The project, designed by CAB Inc., owner of the hotel Visa Lodge, estimated at 26 million dollars, includes the construction of an 11-story hotel with 152 rooms, and managed by the Group Hilton Worldwide.

There will be a full-service restaurant that will offer breakfast, lunch and dinner and a welcome lounge. The hotel will also showcase the shop "24-hour Pavilion Pantry ®" with a selection of delicious ready-made meals, drinks and snacks. Leisure activities will include an outside swimming pool and a free fitness center with “Precor” cardio and body-building equipment.

Guests of the "Hilton Garden Inn Port-au-Prince Louverture Airport" will also have access to a comfortable area with 3 flexible meeting rooms and a conference room. "Hilton Garden Inn" will have free Wi-Fi and a business center, open 24 hours, will complete the accomodations.

This hotel will be located less than a kilometer from the Toussaint Louverture Airport, across from the hotel Visa Lodge. It will be the first Hilton Garden Inn in the Caribbean, and the only hotel with an international brand at the airport.

Street art decorates the walls of Port-au-Prince.

There exist in Haiti an unpublished popular and contemporary pictorial and iconographic tradition. It can be found in the streets, through the hand-painted advertisements, on tap-tap and buses decorated with religious, political or cultural imaging. These popular expressions draw their roots from voodoo iconography, just like internationally acclaimed Haitian paintings. They make up the essence of a typical urban, visual culture, still poorly recognized from an academic standpoint.

It is from this perspective that the French Institute in Haiti imagined the project, "Street-art, to redesign common areas." A project, inaugurated at the end of May, brought to town the French artist Bault to work for two weeks on collaborative murals, along with Haitian artists.

From this project, several murals were created. The first one, which is monumental, extends around the French Institute and raises everyone’s curiosity. The hybrid animals created by Bault are linked to the geometrical shapes of the Haitian painter Joseph Eddy Pierre, alias "1+1 = 0", on a range of colorful combinations. The Center of Art got a facelift too by welcoming two works by Bault, one of which was done in collaboration with the artist Pascale Monnin, and represents an imaginary crocodile being ridden by two children. The presence of the French painter also made it possible to organize workshops with the National School of the Arts (ENARTS), the School of Art of Port-au-Prince, and with patrons of the French Institute, strengthening the exchanges and the artistic cooperation between France and Haiti.

This whole initiative returns street art to its role of investing in the city, creating a common space, and restoring art’s social dimension by putting it within everyone’s reach.

Annual regional conference "Business Futures of the Americas"

The date is nearing. That of June 15^th, which will open the annual regional Conference of the Association of the American Chambers of Commerce of Latin America and the Caribbean (AACCLA).

Business Future of the Americas will be held for the first time in Haiti from June 15 to June 17 2015, at the Hotel Marriott of Port-au-Prince.

The theme of the conference will be "The investments of the Diaspora in Latin America and in the Caribbean."

Régine René Labrousse, who was a guest on Melody FM a few weeks ago and who is the vice-president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Haiti (AmCham-Haïti), informed us about the meeting.

"The accent will be put on the Diaspora and its driving role of investing in the country.  This conference will be a meeting place for our Haitian business people from the Diaspora, who are well-positioned to do business and work in the region."

On June 15th, President Michel Martelly, will open the conference in which the former president of Bolivia, Jorge Fernando Quiroga, will also participate, as well as numerous speakers from the diaspora and the Haitian private sector living in Haiti.

Both co-chairpersons of AmCham Haiti, Ambassadress Pamela White and the Ambassador of Haiti in the United States, Paul Altidor, will intervene throughout the event. The financing of the development of emerging markets will be the subject addressed by Wilson Laleau Minister of the Economy, during the luncheon. High-level speakers are also on the agenda, among whom are representatives from the American Chamber of Commerce of Washington, D.C., George Washington University, and Heineken Americas.

On June 16th will begin closed door sessions that will gather the general assembly of the Association of the American Chambers of Commerce of Latin America and the Caribbean (AACCLA). In the afternoon, the first business meeting will allow the entrepreneurs to meet.

The AmCham Haiti wished to give to this annual conference a wider impact by adding one day to discuss opportunities "to do business in Haiti." The June 17th forum "Doing Business in Haiti" was organized in partnership with the Center of Facilitation of the Investments (CFI), and will provide an opportunity for several personalities to find themselves in a succession of panels that will address the business opportunities in the country: assembly, agro-industry, tourism...

The Minister of Tourism and Industries Stéphanie Villedrouin will present the main tourism plan for Haiti, including investments by the private sector. The day will end with a new session of business meetings.

"This event should provide exceptional opportunities to become familiar and to exchange with a network of more than 300 business managers coming from the United States, the Caribbean, Brazil, and many other countries from the area. Throughout the conference, "Business-to-Business Meetings " (B2Bs) will be planned […] An exhibition of local products will be also presented during all the of the event " specified the vice-president of AmCham-Haïti.

ON-LINE REGISTRATION can be completed on: www.bfa2015haiti.com / home/

On a side note, AmCham is organizing several tours during the conference to give to the foreign visitors an overview of Haiti’s tourist and historic heritage, in addition to the business opportunities.

Détails

Catégorie : What's up Little Haiti

Création : 16 juin 2015

 Fifa: Jack Warner diverted funds for Haiti

Fifa's Jack Warner accused of diverting funds intended for Haiti earthquake victims

US justice department papers seen by BBC allege that US$750,000 for victims of 2010 quake went to bank account controlled by former Fifa vice-president

Former Fifa vice-president Jack Warner at a political rally in Marabella, Trinidad and Tobago.

Jack Warner, the embattled former Fifa vice-president at the centre of corruption charges, faces a new slew of allegations as more details emerge of payments that were reportedly diverted to bank accounts he controlled.

In papers drawn up by US investigators and seen by the BBC, Warner is accused of diverting US$750,000 in emergency funds donated by Fifa and the Korean Football Association intended for victims of the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

The BBC reports US investigators alleging the money went to accounts controlled by Warner, at “Warner’s direction” for his “personal use”.

Warner was arrested last month in Trinidad at the request of US authorities, and faces extradition on charges of corruption and money laundering.

In 2012, the Trinidad & Tobago Football Federation (TTFF) claimed that funds donated for Haiti were paid into a bank account controlled by Warner. It said the money from Fifa ($250,000) and the South Korean FA ($500,000) was paid into a TTFF account it claimed only Warner – a special adviser to the federation – controlled.

At the time, Warner said the allegations were a conspiracy: “I have nothing to answer to anybody. Who wants to make allegations, make allegations.” Fifa froze its funding to the TTFF.

Bahamas : 3 Haitian arrested for human trafficking

The Department of Immigration of the Bahamas arrested three Haitians and a Bahamian, accused of involvement in the arrival of two boats, of 49 undocumented Haitians on the coast of the island of Eleuthera, last week.

In a statement, the Department of Immigration said that charges will be filed against the four suspects for violation of the Immigration Act, which prohibits the protection of undocumented migrants. The three Haitian defendants, who have a permit to work in the Bahamas, were arrested after three illegal immigrants were found and arrested in their home in the village of Bannerman "Many other people had left the house and escaped the arrest," said the department.

The Bahamian arrested resident of Eleuthera, will be accused of having hosted five undocumented Haitian nationals in his house.

The captains of both vessels have also been identified and will be charged with illegal entry of immigrants, whose two of whom died.

This is one of many cases of illegal arrests of Haitian smugglers, who regularly arrive in the archipelago, without proper documents, which led the Bahamian authorities to enforce immigration policies increasingly more stringent for nationals from Haiti.

Recall that on 1 November 2014 entered into force a new law on immigration which created international controversy http://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-12477-haiti-politic-the-hunt-for-illegals-is-open-to-the-bahamas.html This law states that the Bahamas will not accept applications for work visas from persons residing illegally in the country and that immigrants living in the Bahamas should always have on them, among other things, the passport of their homeland. http://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-12709-haiti-politic-bahamas-haiti-the-regularization-problem-of-illegal-migrants-unsolved.html

Note that the Bahamas with a population of about 377,000 inhabitants, would have almost 70,000 immigrants living on its territory, most illegal immigrants, including Haitian 20.000 to 50.000 (Source International Organization for Migration - IOM).

Haiti cancels contracts with beleaguered Dominican senator

Santo Domingo.- Haiti’s government has canceled the contract to build the headquarters of two departments with the companies HOM ROFI, AD owned by Dominican senator Felix Bautista, and assigned the works to a Taiwanese company, Haiti local media report.

They also quote Planning and Foreign Cooperation minister Jose Yves Germain as saying that the transfer came aftter slow progress by the Dominican companies. He said the works must be finished within five months, or before president Michel J. Martelly leaves office.

Germain said the work started in 2011 with the Dominican contractors, with funding of US$16 million from Taiwan.

The companies owned by Bautista, who faces charges of embezzlement and malfeasance in the Dominican Republic, also built five sports arenas worth between?? US$2.0 million and US$3.0 million each.

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio wants 'free, fair' elections for Haiti

Written by Samuel Maxime on 10 June 2015.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (sentinel.ht) - A proposed amendment by U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, if passed, could put U.S. aid to Haiti in jeopardy if "any attempts to disqualify candidates for political office in Haiti for political reasons," are found in the electoral process.

Document

Document said to be proposed resolution for Assessing Progress in Haiti Act

He is one of the potential nominees for president of the Republican party and he is proposing an amendment for the Assessing Progress in Haiti Act of 2014, that was passed by the House of Representatives and Senate but has been waiting a signature from President Barack Obama.

If the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP), which has been under fire for its inconsistent decision to disqualify former Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe from elections, were to maintain this position in its appeal, the Assessing Progress in Haiti Act of 2014, if enacted, would require the U.S. Secretary of State to report on the attempts or eventuality of eliminations from the for political process for political reasons.

Such a report could compromise the aid a Republican-held congress would appropriate to Haiti, one would believe.

Clean up on Clinton foreign policy continues

Haiti went from more than 5,000 elected officials nationwide in 2010 to 11 today, effectively, a totalitarian regime. It wasn't the earthquake. Many point to Obama's first-term Clinton foreign policy as the problem.

The world's attention remains on the earthquake relief debacle. Billary's Katrina, it has become. But the deterioration of democracy in a poor country in this hemisphere has Clinton's prints on it, if one would consult a Senate report, opposition protests and political observers in Haiti.

Congressional Republicans, as well as some Democrats, are demanding more accountability and oversight.The Haiti dossier was a conflict between the interests of the Clintons and interests of the American people.

Haiti would have a lot of impact in the 2016 elections but Republicans would have to employ compassion in order to seal the deal with the issue. This is a challenge for the GOP.

Lamothe and 11 others barred from Haiti presidential race

BY JACQUELINE CHARLES

Former Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe who lobbied politicians in Washington, pleaded with the diaspora in Miami and launched a campaign in Port-au-Prince and on social media to be a contender in Haiti’s upcoming presidential elections, had his hopes officially dashed Friday by the country’s elections panel.

Lamothe and six other former government ministers have all been blocked from running for president, according to the final presidential list by the nine-member Provisional Electoral Council and obtained by the Miami Herald.

Though electoral officials did not list the reasons for their rejection, they all have one thing in common: they lack a décharge or discharge certificate from parliament certifying that they properly managed state funds during their tenure.

In the end, elections officials qualified 58 of the 70 people who registered to run in the Oct. 25 balloting to replace President Michel Martelly, who by law is barred from seeking consecutive five-year presidential terms.

Growing conservation push in north Haiti focuses on restoring coastlines, overfished waters

CARACOL, Haiti – Only little fish are pulled from the coastal waters off Haiti.

In this overfished area of northern Haiti, fishermen who want a catch big enough for a meal say they must travel three hours in a boat to the Dominican Republic, where they scour the reefs of a national park and risk arrest, beatings or even death.

"Going over there is the only way we can feed our families," fisherman Wilfrid Desarme said in Caracol, where the sandy beach is lined with small wooden boats that replaced similar ones seized or torched by Dominican sailors who caught Haitians poaching there with rusty spear guns and fine-mesh nets.

Over the decades, impoverished Haiti has gained a reputation as an environmental wasteland. The country has only about 2 to 3 percent of its original forest cover, most of it lost because trees were cut down to make charcoal for cooking fuel. Its waters are severely overfished, leaving only small, young fish to catch. Coral reefs are clogged with silt washing into the sea from denuded hills.

Now, Haitian conservationist Jean Wiener is leading a homegrown campaign to protect the country's northern coastal areas, including barrier reefs and threatened mangrove forests that serve as crucial spawning grounds and nurseries for fish and crustaceans.

Wiener, who studied biology in the United States before returning to Haiti in 1989, saw his profile rise this year when he was among six global activists who received the prestigious Goldman Environmental Foundation award. The $175,000 prize awarded by an international jury was a big boost for his nonprofit organization, which has six staff members.

In recent years, the 50-year-old activist has successfully fought to create the country's first protected marine areas, including Three Bays National Park. The roughly 80,000-hectare (19,700-acre) zone carved last year out of northern Haiti's overfished Caracol, Limonade and Fort Liberte Bays includes as much as 20 percent of the country's remaining mangroves, which are now illegal to chop down.

But no one enforces the legislation Wiener helped push through in 2013 to protect the mangroves, and he acknowledges there's a long way to go before the new protected marine areas become more than lines on a map. Like many sea sanctuaries around the globe, Haiti's new protected zones are "paper parks," without adequate resources to enforce restrictions.

"For our marine environment, right now at least, there's no law enforcement whatsoever," Wiener says.

Still, scientists have high hopes that the sprawling Three Bays park can eventually help rebuild severely depleted fish stocks and make Haiti's coastal ecosystems more resilient to a warming planet with rising seas and acidifying oceans. There's been plenty of research showing fishermen eventually haul in more fish when a patrolled marine reserve nearby provides a safe haven for fish to grow.

Haiti's new park "contains the most extensive and healthiest coral reefs and other marine and coastal habitats in the country," says Maxene Atis, conservation coordinator for The Nature Conservancy's central Caribbean program.

If the government agrees to provide a few rangers to patrol Three Bays, Wiener says his Foundation for the Protection of Marine Biodiversity could secure the funding to pay their salaries.

The stakes for Haiti's environment are especially high in the coastal areas. Wiener's group last year prepared the first comprehensive report on Haiti's remaining mangroves and found destruction was "extreme" because the trees were being used by people dependent on charcoal for cooking.

To help ease pressures for charcoal and fuel wood, another nonprofit group called Carbon Roots International works with dozens of Haitians at an eight-acre property near Three Bays to manufacture briquettes made primarily from sugarcane husks. These charcoal briquettes are cheaper than the traditional ones made from mangrove and other types of wood and allow farmers to make money off their agricultural waste.

Haiti's northern coast suffers from the harvesting of coral offshore for construction material and soil erosion that deposits smothering silt along the coastal shelf. It's also threatened by effluent from the slowly expanding Caracol Industrial Park that was built after southern Haiti's devastating 2010 earthquake with more than $124 million in U.S. investments and is anchored by a South Korean textile company.

In the face of the diminishing fish populations, Wiener says he is developing alternative livelihoods for local fishermen. Right now he's looking just at honey production, but before the end of the year he hopes to introduce seaweed and oyster production as options.

For now, Haiti has one booming fishing sector left. Near the mouth of a river in Limonade, villagers gather by the hundreds nightly to hunt translucent "glass eels," using scoops fashioned from mosquito nets. The baby eels, which look like noodles with tiny dark eyes, are not eaten in Haiti, but sent by brokers to Asia, where they are fed a high-protein diet to speed their growth. Haiti's unsustainable export market for the globally endangered eels started in 2012, kick-started by Korean businessmen at the industrial park.

Scientists say that overfishing of the tiny eels mirrors that of sea cucumbers, a lumpy invertebrate that is consumed in China as an aphrodisiac. Starting about a decade ago, Haitians overfished and exported that species so quickly in the country's waters that local fishermen say they haven't seen it in years.

Despite the many challenges, Wiener is optimistic because he believes most Haitians share a strong interest in rebuilding the country's ravaged environment.

"We can't be constantly counting on others to do things for us because a lot of (non-Haitian) people don't have a vested interest in seeing anything change whereas we really do," he said.

At Caracol's fishing village, 60-year-old fisherman Jacqueson Cadet hopes for an easier life for his grandchildren.

"We must make changes or else we won't have any fish or any fishermen left here," Cadet says wistfully, looking at the lapping waves. "Nobody wants fishing to be an old dream."

Détails

Catégorie : What's up Little Haiti

Création : 24 juin 2015

 Stop mass deportation from the Dominican Republic to Haiti

Washington and the international community must pressure Santo Domingo to avert impending crisis

June 19, 2015 2:00AM ET

by Lauren Carasik

The Dominican Republic is expected to begin deporting an estimated 500,000 undocumented immigrants after the deadline to file paperwork for adjustment of status expired on June 17. The specter of mass deportations has raised alarms about an unfolding humanitarian disaster. Yet the crisis has generated little international attention, much less condemnation from world leaders.

Billed by Dominican authorities as a legitimate immigration policy to deal with undocumented immigrants, the policy targets Haitians and those who trace their roots to Haiti. There are two distinct Haitian populations in the Dominican Republic: Dominicans of Haitian descent, born in the country, who were citizens until Santo Domingo unlawfully denationalized them in 2013, and Haitian immigrants, many of whom are low-wage workers engaging in manual and domestic labor.

Dominican nationalists have long agitated to rid the country of its darker-skinned inhabitants. The impending deportations suggest that this social cleansing may now be conducted under the patina of legitimacy. But legal and humane deportations require individual screening and orderly repatriation, not mass expulsions to a ravaged country ill prepared to absorb them.

Immigrants face increasing hostility in the Dominican Republic. Tensions intensified in 2010 after a flood of Haitians crossed the border after the devastating earthquake in Haiti. In February unidentified assailants lynched a Haitian in Santiago, the country’s second-largest city, fueling concerns of escalating racial violence. The prospects for repatriated Haitians and expelled Dominicans are bleak. For Dominican-born children of Haitian descent, Haiti has never been home. Many have no family connections. They do not speak the local language and lack Haitian citizenship or its accompanying rights.

It wasn’t always this way. Historically, all children born on Dominican soil were granted citizenship, except children of diplomats and foreigners in transit. But a 2004 migration law extended in-transit status to nonresidents, including undocumented Haitian immigrants. The law retroactively equated people whose families have been in the country for nearly a century with those en route to another destination.

A 2013 Dominican court decision, which stripped citizenship from children of undocumented immigrants born in the Dominican Republic, has rendered more than 200,000 people stateless. After an international outcry, last year the government backpedaled from the unlawful denationalization, creating a path to citizenship for undocumented children born in the country through what was called a regularization process.

Applicants seeking to adjust their status were supposed to obtain the necessary documents by February and complete the process by June 17 or face deportation. But the process has been fraught with delays, bureaucratic impediments and corruption, causing anguish and uncertainty. Few of those eligible for adjustment of legal status have succeeded in changing it.

The US and the rest of the international community must pressure Dominican authorities to end efforts to deport Dominican-born citizens and to halt the impending mass deportations of Haitian immigrants.

The country’s well-documented efforts to denationalize Dominican-born children of immigrants suggest that these problems are at least partly by design. Fewer than half of the country’s 500,000 foreign workers who are eligible for legal status have initiated the regularization process. To date, only about 300 have received permits. And only a small percentage of Dominicans of Haitian origin have started the naturalization process.

For Dominicans of Haitian descent, obtaining proof of birth is difficult. And many immigrants cannot prove they have met the residency requirements or obtain work permits because employers are loath to admit hiring undocumented immigrants. Those born in rural areas or at home are typically not issued birth certificates. The process is further hampered because transportation to immigration processing centers and costs associated with obtaining the paperwork are prohibitive and minor inconsistencies are grounds for denial. And even for those who manage to gather the required documents, the processing centers are under resourced and difficult to navigate.

Those who are not immediately deported, including those with residency permits, will continue to face difficulty accessing basic services. “While the terms ‘resident’ and ‘stateless’ might seem bureaucratic, in reality, legal citizenship can be vital to open up access to education, health care and work, among other fundamental rights,” Erika Guevara Rosas, the Americas director for Amnesty International, wrote in January. 

Some Dominican-born people of Haitian descent have refused to accept the second-class status conferred by the naturalization process. Even those who qualify for citizenship will not be entitled to full benefits such as running for office, further enshrining inequality. The timing of the deportations, which coincides with the start of the 2016 election season, has not escaped notice by critics.

The Dominican Republic is dependent on immigrant labor. It is more stable and affluent than its deeply impoverished neighbor. Dominican authorities have a long history of inviting Haitians to work on sugar cane plantations and perform other manual jobs shunned by the locals.  But some Dominicans resent the immigrants as a social burden. Despite the inhospitable reception, dire conditions in Haiti have compelled many Haitians to flee instability and poverty. As a result, Haitian immigrants have long been buffeted between nationalist vitriol and the demand for low-wage laborers, whose precarious legal status leaves them vulnerable to exploitation.

Meanwhile, Dominican officials continue to send mixed signals about the pace and timing of the deportations, sowing confusion that has only heightened fear and uncertainty. It is still unclear whether deportations will start immediately or after a 45-day grace period. Interior Minister José Ramón Fadul said that authorities will not engage in mass roundups. But the country’s immigration agency says its officers will start patrolling immigrant neighborhoods on June 18 and that security forces have been readied for deportation duty. Authorities have set up reception centers to house Haitians before repatriation and reserved buses to transport deportees to the border, suggesting that action is imminent.

Dominican officials have staunchly defended the country’s right to make sovereign immigration policy decisions and brushed off criticisms about unlawful, inhumane and racially motivated treatment of immigrants. This may explain the U.S. State Department’s muted response to the crisis, as it echoes Washington’s approach to its immigration troubles. But the U.S. and the rest of the international community cannot remain silent: They have a moral responsibility to implore Dominican authorities to end efforts to deport Dominican-born citizens and halt the impending mass deportations of Haitian immigrants until they are afforded fair and effective regularization and repatriation processes.

Lauren Carasik is a clinical professor of law and the director of the international human rights clinic at the Western New England University School of Law.

The bloody origins of the Dominican Republic's ethnic 'cleansing' of Haitians

ABBY PHILLIP | THE WASHINGTON POST

There is an artificial line that splits the island of Hispaniola in two. On one side is Haiti, and on the other is the Dominican Republic.

There was a time when that split between the two countries was drawn with blood; the 1937 Parsley Massacre is widely regarded as a turning point in Haitian-Dominican relations. The slaughter, carried out by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, targeted Haitians along with Dominicans who looked dark enough to be Haitian — or whose inability to roll the “r” in perejil, the Spanish word for parsley, gave them away.

The Dajabón River, which serves as the northernmost part of the international border between the two countries, had “risen to new heights on blood alone,” wrote Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat.

“The massacre cemented Haitians into a long-term subversive outsider incompatible with what it means to be Dominicans,” according to Border of Lights, an organization that commemorated the 75th anniversary of the massacre in 2012.

Today, things are as tense on the island as they have been in years. Within days, the Dominican government is expected to round up Haitians — or, really, anyone black enough to be Haitian — and ship them to the border, where they will likely be expelled.

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that the head of the Dominican Republic’s immigration agency, Army Gen. Ruben Paulino, said his agency will begin patrolling neighborhoods with large numbers of migrants on Thursday.

“If they aren’t registered, they will be repatriated,” Paulino said, according to the AP.

The government has described it, in terms chillingly reminiscent of the Holocaust, as a “cleansing” of the country’s immigration rolls.

Cassandre Theano, a legal officer at the New York-based Open Society Foundations, said the comparisons between the Dominican government’s actions and the denationalization of Jews in Nazi Germany are justified.

“We’ve called it as such because there are definitely linkages,” she told The Washington Post this week. “You don’t want to look a few years back and say, ‘This is what was happening and I didn’t call it.’ ”

In other words, 78 years later, these are the fruits of Trujillo’s bloody campaign to sow anti-Haitian sentiment in the Dominican Republic.

“The root cause is discrimination; it’s really a long-standing discrimination against those of Haitian descent,” said Marselha Goncalves Margerin, ‎advocacy director for the Americas at Amnesty International. “The Dominican Republic has not been able to establish a strong policy to combat it.”

The discrimination starts with the long-standing practice of not recognizing as Dominican people of Haitian descent who were born in the Dominican Republic. Instead, they are lumped in with a second group: Haitian migrants who came to the country — sometimes brought by force — to work in the sugarcane fields.

Then, in 2013, the country’s Constitutional Court ruled that no longer would people born in the Dominican Republic automatically be considered citizens. The rule, the court decided, would retroactively apply to anyone born after 1929.

The change overwhelmingly affects Haitians and people of Haitian descent. And its impact reaches back generations.

In reality, Theano said, “cleaning” the Dominican registration rolls to root out fraud and non-citizens entails identifying Haitian-sounding names, then forcing Haitian migrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent to prove that they are citizens.

The deadline for procuring the documents necessary to prove citizenship if you were born in the Dominican Republic lapsed in February. And on Wednesday, the deadline for migrants to “regularize” their statuses will also expire.

What happens Thursday is unknown.

“People are concerned that they will be indiscriminately targeting people who are darker skinned, black Dominicans, Dominican Haitians and Haitian migrants,” said Theano. “There is no science behind how they pick people.

“They literally look at you and decide whether you fit the profile or not.”

© 2015, The Washington Post

220,000 Dominicans of Haitian Descent Facing Deportation from the Dominican Republic

STOP THE DEPORTATION!!

Community Members and Students Stand Against Mass Deportations of Haitians in the Dominican Republic

TALLAHASSEE, FL - On June 19, 2015 at 1:00 pm a rally was scheduled to be held in front of the Florida Historic Capitol, where State Representative Daphne Campbell, community members and students from various organizations were to protest the mass deportation of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic.  The protest was organized by State Representative Daphne Campbell. Also scheduled to be in attendance were Representative Hazel Rogers, D-94 and Haitian Lives Do Matter, Black Liberation Action Coordinating Committee (BLACC), Dream Defenders and Recycle4Haiti Foundation Inc.

Two years ago the Dominican Republic introduced a law known as TC 168/13 which has striped thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent of their Dominican citizenship. The law charges and denationalizes Dominicans of Haitian descent born after 1929.  From one day to the next, thousands of Dominicans were revoked of their citizenship and are at risk of facing deportation starting on June 15th, 2015. Haitian Lives Do Matter and other groups demand the Dominican Republic to stop violating the human rights of black Dominicans and halt the deportation!

Haitian Lives Do Matter! No Human is Illegal! #HaitianLivesDoMatter  #HaitianLivesMatter

Détails

Catégorie : What's up Little Haiti

Création : 1 juillet 2015

 IDB opens new office in Haiti

PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti (CMC) – Five years after a powerful earthquake caused widespread damage and death in Haiti, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has inaugurated a new country office building in the French-speaking Caribbean Community (CARICOM) country while pledging its commitment to help rebuild the country.

IDB President Luis Alberto Moreno described the event as “one of transition, shifting from primarily addressing urgent post-quake demands related to the most basic elements, such as providing food, shelter and water, to a more forward-looking set of sustainable initiatives that will improve lives”.

More than 200 people, including Prime Minister Evans Paul, Haiti’s Finance Minister and IDB Governor Wilson Laleau as well as other members of the Government and the diplomatic community attended the ceremony.

The IDB said that the new building houses one of the IDB’s largest country offices, with 85 full-time personnel, “all dedicated to working with the government and private sector to build institutional capacity, improve quality of life, and increase economic opportunity in the Caribbean nation”.

It said the building was designed and constructed to meet the most stringent of international structural and seismic standards and incorporates a number of sustainability features, including solar panels for electricity generation, rainwater harvesting, insulated walls, and occupancy sensors for lighting control. The building also utilizes an open space plan, which contributes to and reflects the Bank’s goals of efficiency, collaboration, innovation, and transparency.

The IDB said the completion of the building coincided with the midpoint of the its  10-year, US$2.2 billion commitment to support the Haitian Government’s efforts to improve the efficiency of its operations, increase economic opportunities and improve quality of life.

Following the 2010 earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people, the IDB announced that it was pardoning Haiti’s $484 million in debt and agreed to provide all future aid in the form of non-reimbursable grants, at the rate of US$200 million a year from 2010 through 2020.

Dominican Republic Deportations Affects Haiti Border Region

TeleSUR - The deportation of thousands of Haitians will have an adverse effect on some parts of the Dominican economy. Tensions have been mounting in the northern border region between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, as Dominican officials start enforcing new strict immigration policies that could see up to 30,000 Haitians deported. The border town of Dajabon has long been a popular spot for Haitians to find work, either in the service or agricultural sectors, or to buy and sell market goods. Border officials have traditionally allowed these temporary crossings, as many of the Haitians return to Haiti at the end of the day.

According to reports from the Washington Post Wednesday, the new immigration regulations in the Dominican Republic will make this open border and working scenario much harder for Haitians, while it will also have a huge impact on the local economy that depends on Haitian labor and business. “They make our economy dynamic,” Ana Carrasco, a Dominican restaurant owner in Dajabon told the Washington Post. “People come to buy eggs, chicken, spaghetti. If they don’t buy it in this market, they don’t eat. Hunger doesn’t have a flag, nor a border, nor a color, nor politics. It’s hunger. It’s necessity.”  Just as Haitians have come to depend on Dajabon to find work and food, local Dominican business owners in the town have come to rely on Haitians to supply much needed labor. “Haitians make our economy dynamic” “This issue affects my business, because my employees can’t come to work,” said Carrasco. According to Dominican rice farmer Hiroshi Rodriguez, the manual labor on his farm is done by trucked-in Haitian workers because “Dominicans don't want to work,” he told the Washington Post.   The new stringent immigration laws are part of the Dominican Republic's new plan to “bring order to the country,” according to government officials. Tens of thousands of Haitians are expected to be deported since they are living in the country without proper papers, even though many of them were born there or have been there for years. Haitians were given a June 17 deadline to apply for residency permits, if they could prove they had lived in the Dominican Republic prior to 2011. RELATED: Haitian-American Author: Deportations 'State-Sponsored Open Season' The northern border area has also seen an influx of Haitians from all across the Dominican Republic, who have already started to leave through the Dajaban border crossing. According to reports by the Washington Post, some 12,000 Haitians have voluntarily fled, fearing that pending deportations could turn violent. Many Haitians have ended up in Ounaminthe across the border, not knowing what to do next.

The mayor of New York speaks out on the tragedy of the deported Haitians

In a declaration last week, the Mayor of the City of New York, Bill de Blasio, said he was extremely worried by the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people from the Dominican Republic to Haiti, including many children, learnt HPN.

Bill de Blasio called on the Dominican government to respect the guaranteed fundamental rights for every people, including the Dominicans of Haitian origin, by virtue of international law.

"I also ask the government to avoid the inevitable errors, the dangers and the humiliation of deporting by force people from their homes. Among the people the most the affected by this action will be descendants of Haitians, born in the Dominican Republic, but who are inequitably deprived of their nationality and their legal status, simply because of their ancestry", declared the mayor of the City of New York.

"The Universal Declaration of Human Rights stipulates that the nationality is a fundamental law to all the individuals," continued Mr. De Blasio.

The mayor hopes to see a compassionate and human resolution to this alarming situation. HPN

The Dominican Republic Wants To Deport 60,000 Stateless Kids

THE HUFFINGTON POST

LAGUNA SALADA, Dominican Republic -- When the summer draws to a close, it should be time for Elaihi Chalis, 15, to go back to school.

But without a birth certificate, she says she won’t be able to enroll in her local high school and will have to stay home or find a job -- not only dashing her hopes to continue educating herself, but also limiting her ability to significantly contribute to national economy down the road. Going back to school is just one of Chalis' worries. Though she was born in this country, she and her mother say the hospital refused to provide documentation of her birth because her mother is an undocumented immigrant from Haiti. Like thousands of other minors, she does not have citizenship in either the Dominican Republic or Haiti, making her stateless. After the deadline to register with the Dominican government as a foreign national passed last week, Chalis now faces the threat of deportation.

"Why do they want to take us and send us to Haiti?" Chalis said in an interview with The Huffington Post. "I don't want to go. I don't know anything about Haiti."

A series of Dominican legal developments since 2004 have eliminated the concept of birthright citizenship here. A 2013 decision by the Constitutional Court applied the new standard retroactively, effectively stripping thousands of Dominican-born people of their citizenship.

Dominican officials have staunchly defended their widely criticized efforts to codify citizenship standards that exclude people born in the country to undocumented parents, arguing that sovereign countries have the right to decide their own citizenship laws. To highlight how reasonable their policies are, they point to a program that ended in February and was designed to restore citizenship to those who once held a Dominican national ID card or passport, and to allow people born in the country to register as foreign nationals with a two-year pathway to citizenship.

Roughly 56,000 people who had previously held Dominican passports or other national identification documents will have their citizenship restored through the plan, which ran for over eight months, officials say.

But fewer than 9,000 people born in the country who lack proper documentation signed up for the naturalization plan, a figure that immigrant rights groups and international human rights organizations say falls short of the roughly 200,000 people they think may have qualified. A coalition of nongovernmental organizations including Save the Children and World Vision says 60,000 of those stateless people are children or teenagers. The overwhelming majority of the Dominican Republic's stateless people are of Haitian descent and black, leading critics to say racism has played a role in pushing these policies forward.

A second plan to normalize the status of undocumented immigrants passed last week, leaving those who didn't register no further options for obtaining legal residence.

A visit to the Dominican Republic's impoverished countryside highlights the number of children who, like Chalis, have a claim to Dominican citizenship and missed the change to register for naturalization. It's a problem that promises to expand with time, as new generations of children born here to undocumented or stateless parents will continue to lack access to Dominican citizenship.

Dozens of children and teenagers in Laguna Salada who were born in this country say they left the hospital without proper documentation.

Part of problem is authorities who have refused to give birth certificates to children born to undocumented parents, people here say. Some parents say the hospital where their kids were born never gave them a record documenting the child's birth. Others say they gave birth at home -- which still occurs with some regularity in the Dominican countryside -- and that authorities said they had no way of proving the children weren't born in Haiti.

Bureaucratic inefficiency also plays a role. Many parents with several children say some received documentation at birth while others did not, without explanation.

Congresswoman Clarke asks the Dominican Republic to reconsider its policy

Congresswoman Yvette D. Clarke published a statement on the humanitarian crisis in the Dominican Republic, where the government threatens to repatriate several hundred thousand Haitian.

"There are nearly a half million people of Haitian origin in the Dominican Republic. 288,000 people registered to legalize their status to stay there, but reports indicate that 90 % of the candidates could not provide the required evidence, to have lived in Dominican Republic constantly since October, 2011.

Today, hundreds of thousands of Haitian nationals and people of Haitian origin are threatened with eviction from the Dominican Republic, a policy which will only aggravate the humanitarian crisis in Haiti, which has not recovered from the 2010 earthquake with numerous families displaced from their homes. Many people targeted by the deportation were born in the Dominican Republic or have lived there for most of their lives […] As a result, I am profoundly worried by the policy requiring Haitians to carry with them documents proving their legal status in the Dominican Republic to avoid arrest [notes: all nationalities are concerned]. This is reminiscent of the policy of South Africa under apartheid, in which blacks had to carry a travel book. Without jobs in Haiti, without families to support them, or houses where to live, these displaced families will experience extreme poverty.

I implore the Government of the Dominican Republic to reconsider this deportation policy and to work with the community of Caribbean nations to prevent this useless crisis from occurring.

With my colleagues from the Congress and with the State Department, I am going to work to prevent the forced mobilization of hundreds of thousands of Haitians and people of Haitian origin from their homes."

The United States denounced the "discriminatory measures" against Haitian immigrants and their descendants in Dominican Republic.

The document notes the controversial decision of the Dominican Constitutional court of September, 2013, which fixes the parameters of acquisition for citizenship.

"This decision stipulates that the descendants of people considered illegal in the country, among whom many are of Haitian origin, do not have the right for the Dominican nationality," noted the report which is use as a guide for Congress to decide on granting assistance to every country."

This report examines the behavior of governments all over the world (except the United States) on human rights.

Last Monday, approximately 200 people gathered in front of the embassy of the Dominican Republic in Washington to press this country to stop the process of "deportation" of more than 200,000 people, including Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian origin who have become stateless, and could be expelled to Haiti.

The main fear of the NGO (NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATION) and the international organizations is not only the risk of massive deportations, but the eviction of people born in the country, because they are the daughters and sons of Haitian illegal immigrants.  This is taking place in spite of the fact that they played an important role in the social, economic and political life of the country, having been able to vote during the last presidential election which brought the president Medina to power.

50 % of the Haitian population consumes some contaminated water

The platform of the organizations of defense of human rights (POHDH), declared critical and alarming the water problem in Haiti. This statement was made during its traditional press conference last Friday under the theme: “The marginalization of the water a threat for human rights.”

The person in charge of education, culture and human rights for Alermy Kervilus’ platform, said that according to the last report by DINEPA, about 50 percent of the population uses some contaminated water and 30 % walk more than 30 minutes before finding some water.

For his part the executive secretary of the POHDH, Anthonal Mortime, considers this situation a violation of human rights, because the state is not taking care of the population. According to him, the right to water is a sacred right just as civil and political rights.