Originally published on the CGS blog on May 16, 2014.
Most of us take our citizenship for granted, thinking the world belongs to people of one nation or another, but imagine being stripped of it completely.
In a world run by nation-states, there is no universal form of citizenship or birth registration. There are only those recognized by national governments that can and do revoke it for various political motives. The estimated numberto date by the UNHCR of stateless persons, families and communities who have no nation to legally call home is 10 million.
The most recent of these tragedies occurred in September, when the Constitutional Court of the Dominican Republic passed a ruling which de-nationalized an estimated 210,000 Haitian citizens by denying them citizenship and the right to an official ID. This simple act by courts, which has deeply affected the lives of nearly 7 percent of the country’s population either directly or indirectly, receives an overwhelming 83 percent of support from Dominicans.
Having your citizenship taken away can deal a powerful blow to your wellbeing. As one rights activist featured in an Aljazeera piece states, “It’s not that I feel Dominican. I am Dominican. I was born here in the Dominican Republic, and all my documents are from here… I have never been in another country.”
The article concludes that sudden statelessness is an “extremely serious situation… You can’t do anything without identification. You can’t study, work, travel, and access the health system. It’s a social death. This situation creates a lot of civil deaths.”
The gravity of this situation pulls interest from around the globe as people interested in the welfare of millions seek an answer to those who fall through the cracks and policies of a nationalized world. The solution for some is universal birth registry. Why? Because this simple political mechanism would allow for citizens to solve one of the greatest barriers for stateless persons: re-applying. It would enable millions to have the basic documents they need to apply for citizenship or refugee status wherever they may be stranded, as opposed to being completely undocumented.
In short, better international collaboration can help lessen the burden upon the stateless individuals and communities strewn throughout the world. Unfortunately, this would do little to remove the underlying cause of most stateless predicaments: discrimination.
The CNN feature covering this event begins by addressing the prominence of discrimination in this legal outcome: “In September the Constitutional Court of the Dominican Republic issued a ruling which affirmed the discriminatory and arbitrary denial of nationality to Dominicans of foreign descent.”
In any event there are both long-term and short-term solutions. A short-term solution is to seek to reverse the ruling through an international human rights campaign. If the campaign is taken on by enough NGOs, media personalities and politicians may exert enough pressure to change the consensus.
However, the root of the struggle both in Haiti and globally is to overcome the idea of exclusionary forms of citizenship–that is, citizenry being defined as an us-and-them rhetoric rather than the more modern, inclusive form of citizenship expected of all the global cities today. From New York, London, and Rome to Shanghai, cities struggle to find methods to integrate, knowing that to do so is inevitable in an age of global commerce and demos. The Dominican Republic is not doing itself any favors in the long term financially or politically, for the people or for its own viability as a modern state.
After all, what message does it send to future economic migrants to so treat a group that was the backbone of the sugar industry and a major boon of the economy for decades? Any economist will tell you that to think you won’t need willing migrant labor in the future is a grave mistake.
