DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

Ratify the MWC; it’s a fair deal

WHEN the Migrant Workers Convention enters into force later this year, it will mark a critical step in the bid to secure widespread recognition and protection of migrant workers' rights. Officially known as the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, the Convention requires ratifying States to guarantee migrant workers and their families a wide array of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights.

The ratification of the Dominican Republic will surely be absent when the Convention goes into effect. In recent years, the Dominican Republic has come under intense international scrutiny for its treatment of migrant workers, most of whom come from Haiti to work on sugar plantations.

Accounts of discriminatory treatment, failure to grant citizenship to children of Haitian parents born in the country, appalling living conditions, and arbitrary expulsions have drawn the attention of the UN Human Rights Committee, the Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights, and international civil society.

Haitian Immigrants

The Dominican Republic's Director General of Migration, Trajano Moreta Cuevas, estimated in January 2001 that there were one million Haitians without documents residing on Dominican soil. The Dominican Republic has for decades depended on Haitian migrants as a source of cheap labour for its sugar plantations. More recently, these workers have become increasingly active in the construction, commerce, and domestic services industries.

Most of these Haitians have taken up long-term residence in the Dominican Republic; official estimates during the mid-1990s placed the number of permanent Haitian residents in the country between 400,000 and 500,000. Among the most chronic abuses suffered by Haitian labourers in the Dominican Republic are massive expulsions, unrecognised labour rights, and the discriminatory implementation of laws regarding nationality and residential status.

One of the primary challenges faced by migrant workers in the Dominican Republic is regularising their immigration status. Dominican authorities apply immigration and citizenship laws in a manner that serves to perpetuate what the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has termed the "permanent illegality" of both Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent.

Due to their poverty and illiteracy, many Haitians encounter severe difficulties in obtaining temporary work permits. The result is that only about five percent of Haitians in Dominican territory have identification documents of any kind; many have lived there for 20 or 30 years without ever gaining legal status.

Haitian workers' status as illegal immigrants is then passed onto their children, even if they are born in the Dominican Republic. As a consequence of this discriminatory treatment, many children of Haitian origin have been denied fundamental rights, such as the right to nationality of the country of birth, access to health care, and access to education.

Because it is virtually impossible for Haitian migrant workers and their Dominican-born children to regularise their residential status in the Dominican Republic, migrant workers are subject to deportation at any time and are vulnerable to human rights violations by the Dominican authorities.

For example, Dominican authorities continue to expel Haitians, at times hundreds in single operations in violation of Dominican law. Dominican immigration officials concede that the official deportation procedure is rarely followed. They admit to focusing their efforts on Haitians who are wandering or panhandling in the streets and to summarily finding Haitians not in possession of identification to be in the country illegally.

Victims of these summary deportations paint an even more troubling picture of the process, a picture characterised by deep-seated racism, a disturbing lack of respect for personal dignity, and the absence of due process. Interviews conducted by the Berkeley International Human Rights Law Clinic suggest that Dominican officials assume that all who identify themselves as Haitians can be subject to immediate arrest and expulsion. One victim explained to the Berkeley researchers, "the police yell at you, 'Hey Haitian', and when you turn round they carry you away."

Haitians routinely report that Dominican officials destroyed their documents; others complain that officials never asked for documents or ignored their offers to present such documents. In violation of official procedures, none of the deportees interviewed by the Berkeley group were given the chance to contact family members in an effort to prove their legality.

Some of the victims felt too intimidated to interact at all with the officials. Indeed, ten percent of them reported being physically abused during the deportation process, and others were subjected to racial insults. Those who were detained were subjected to inadequate conditions, including a failure by Dominican authorities to provide food, water, or bathrooms.

Forced Labour

Migrant workers who manage to remain in the Dominican Republic are also subject to frequent violations of other basic rights. On the sugarcane plantations where most migrant workers are employed, for example, employers apply a variety of means to keep labourers from leaving, including the presence of armed guards, confiscation of clothes and documents, and the withholding of wages.

Labourers sign contracts which, due to the fact that the vast majority are illiterate, most are unable to read. On some plantations they are paid in vouchers rather than in cash, and their salaries are based on the amount of sugarcane they cut (approximately US$3 per tonne) rather than an hourly or weekly wage. Because labourers are not permitted to monitor the weighing of their production, this procedure invites unfairness in wages.

Women migrant workers face an even more precarious situation. Though women account for about five percent of cane cutters, their presence is not officially acknowledged. Women are thus unable to obtain documents and earn half of what the men are paid; they also suffer sexual exploitation at the hands of batey (work camp) chiefs, plantation guards, and migration officials. In some cases children are also present in the fields.

Migrant workers' living conditions are similarly abhorrent. In 1999, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights decried the general lack of sewage and electricity in the bateyes (at the time owned by the State) where sugarcane cutters and their families live. The bateyes were further characterised by overcrowding, inadequate hygiene and drinking water, and by the absence of health and education facilities.

The Inter-American Commission revisited many of these issues in its 2001 Annual Report. It recognised as positive the Dominican State's issuing of new directives that it said would enable Haitian people without documents living in the Dominican Republic to access educational services.

Otherwise, however, the living conditions of migrant workers had worsened rather than improved since the Commission’s 1999 report, due in large part to the privatisation of the sugarcane industry. A World Bank report dated 17 December 2001 concluded that privatisation had led to dramatic consequences for the families of sugarcane workers, who were overwhelmingly poor. Labourers now work longer hours while earning less, with fewer benefits.

The capacity of Haitian migrant workers to combat these unjust labour conditions is limited. Though unions are legal, labour organising is hazardous. In March 2000, for example, 150 sugar workers were laid off for trying to form a trade union. Though the majority were later reinstated, some were not.

In general, Haitian migrants do not have an effective remedy to seek unpaid salaries or redress unjust labour practices and summary expulsions. Widespread social and political hostility towards Haitians in the Dominican Republic means that employers may unilaterally establish the terms of employment and impede migrant workers from seeking relief for maltreatment. The vast majority of undocumented immigrants do not have access to legal assistance, making recourse to the labour courts a practical impossibility.

The threat of deportation also plays a powerful coercive role in maintaining exploitative labour condition. Dominican employers have been known to arrange for workers to be deported before they have a chance to collect their salaries. Dominican authorities are implicated in these abuses through their tolerance of severe labour rights violations committed by employers against Haitian migrant workers.

Currently, Haitian migrants and their Dominican-born children are not equal under the law. Laws on residence and citizenship are applied in a discriminatory (and arguably illegal) manner, maintaining the "permanent illegality" of migrant workers. Deportation proceedings are marked by a disregard for due process, lack of respect for personal integrity, and physical abuse, reflecting the apathy (if not antipathy) of the Dominican State with regard to Haitian labourers. These residence and immigration practices serve to maintain the powerlessness of Haitian communities, and by doing so sustain and reinforce the exploitative relationship between the Dominican Republic and Haitian labourers.

The Dominican Republic has benefited for decades from an influx of cheap Haitian labour, and the State has developed a system that preserves this profitable infusion of migrants while failing to guarantee their basic rights. The Dominican Republic should genuinely commit itself to overhauling this system. As the Migrant Worker Convention is due to enter into force, the government should commit itself to respecting and protecting the rights of migrant workers and their families first by ratifying the Convention, then by assuring its implementation at home.