Eve Hayes de Kalaf, Legal Identity, Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic: From Citizen to Foreigner. London: Anthem Press, 2021. xix + 126 pp. (Cloth US$ 125.00)
Legal Identity, Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic provides extensive historical context to the contemporary problem of statelessness in the Dominican Republic. Eve Hayes de Kalaf’s keen attention to the role of activism and legal rulings on an international stage provides the backdrop for the events leading up to the 2013 Sentencia that stripped citizenship from tens of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Following this policy change, children can effectively inherit their parents’ undocumented status.
Hayes uses policy analysis, archival research, and semi-structured interviews to illustrate how citizens struggle to retain or gain access to their Dominican legal identity. In addition to providing policy timelines that guide readers through an intensely complex landscape, she highlights the voices of Dominican citizens who must repeatedly navigate and negotiate complex bureaucratic systems in order to gain access to the legal identity documents that prove their Dominican citizenship—all this to a nation that is working hard to carve them out of the national imaginary.
Much of the scholarship on the Dominican Republic foregrounds the lenses of Dominican-Haitian relations, cross-border migrations, and anti-Haitianism. In contrast, Legal Identity, Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic makes a compelling argument for considering the experiences of Haitian-descended populations within the broader context of global efforts to address under-registration. It encourages us to consider legal identity practices across all populations, while also acknowledging the integral role of Dominican ethnoracial dynamics in its citizenship policies.
Although scholarly attention to legal citizenship in the Dominican Republic is emergent, Hayes skillfully interrogates the broader global context contributing to contemporary policies that retroactively strip citizenship from native-born Black citizens of Haitian ancestry in the Dominican Republic. She connects the Dominican state’s documentation policy changes with broader registration and legal identity goals prioritized by international organizations such as the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Inter-American Development Bank.
The Dominican Republic has one of the highest levels of under-registration in Latin America and the Caribbean. International policymakers prioritized legal identity as a core aim of the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, but with limited examination of how vulnerable populations are impacted when they are at the center of disputes about race, national identity, and belonging. In response to Sustainable Development Goals, many countries implemented government system changes to record and address under-registration. However, Hayes argues that the solutions to under-registration are not related to bolstering the bureaucratic system with more efficient management or better technology; rather, the solution is to shed light on the abuse and manipulation stemming from formal identification practices and to address the racial, social, and gender-related tensions that inevitably arise.
Chapter 3, “Including the ‘Excluded’: International Organizations and the Administrative (Re)Ordering of Dominicans,” is the book’s greatest contribution to the scholarly discussion of statelessness and citizenship in the Dominican Republic. This chapter describes how updated social policy systems created the bureaucratic infrastructure, or the “state architecture,” for the Dominican government to block Dominicans of Haitian descent from their legal identity documentation. International organizations such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the United Nations pushed the Dominican state to provide Dominicans with identification cards in order to increase uptake for social welfare programs. As part of this endeavor, the Dominican state’s infrastructure was redesigned to connect the civil registry—the primary office responsible for documentation—with government departments responsible for welfare payments and healthcare provision. These changes introduced more sophisticated technologies that not only allowed the state to better identify Dominicans eligible for social welfare programs, but also allowed it to block Dominicans of Haitian descent from accessing their legal identity documentation.
When new systems are created and new policies introduced, what are the potential unintended consequences? What does implementation look like for the most marginalized populations? When considering international development policy, nations and organizations must examine the entire truth of the impacts we produce.
Lack of access to citizenship makes it harder for people to access education, healthcare, welfare, and pensions. Identification systems are expanding rapidly across the globe with limited critique of the way large-scale registration of citizens might further marginalize vulnerable segments of the population. The risk is a shift toward a world where both migrants and citizens become targets of discriminatory racial profiling and exclusionary practices. This book offers an analytic perspective that underscores the urgent need for international policy solutions that protect all people.
