White House Petition: "Dutch Law Being Used to Justify Ethnic Cleansing in the Dominican Republic"

Future justification for ethnic cleansing. Het Parool
A new White House petition is asking the Obama administration to prevent the government of the Netherlands from deporting the children of its citizens. 
 
Dutch citizenship law is quite complex, and besides naturalization, citizenship can only be gained through birth in the Netherlands if one's parents are residing there legally. Further, it can also be revoked from individuals who do not reside within the kingdom for a certain period of time. 
 
Last summer, the government of the Netherlands began deporting entire families, forcing adults born and raised in the kingdom to relocate to countries they had never even visited. 

This mass deportation was front page news in the Netherlands, but it did not receive coverage in the international media. Instead, the international media mostly reported on the Dominican Republic, a developing Caribbean country struggling to control cholera coming in from nearby Haiti. 
An island divided. NASA

This is in contrast to one of the wealthiest parliamentary monarchies in the world and the seat of nearly every important international body and court, where the immigration authorities are not struggling to control a pandemic in nearby Belgium, even if like Haiti, it does not have a functioning government. 

The Netherlands, in a more terrifying manner than the Dominican Republic, implemented and regularly applies immigration laws which target even the children of its citizens. Eventually, these laws were bound to ensnare a Dominican national whose parent(s) is a Dutch national; and they have, as was the case with one of our editors. 

In the half year since the Dominican Republic began implementing its strict immigration laws, stripping citizenship from everyone who could not prove that their ancestors arrived in the country legally all the way back to 1929, more than one hundred thousand people of Haitian descent have been displaced from the eastern side of the country, to makeshift camps in Haiti, which occupies the western third of the island.

Assimilate! 7 Dias
So far, people of Haitian descent who can prove with a birth certificate that they were born in the Dominican Republic have been spared from the dreaded immigration raids. However, these people are now only legal residents, and there's nothing preventing the country's Constitutional Tribunal from ruling in a future case that the children of citizens and lawful residents are not entitled to remain in Dominican territory unless they can prove, as was required in the Netherlands of people born there and eventually deported, that they be fully assimilated into the society.

The Dutch government gave deportation orders to people who graduated from the country's high schools with honors and had been accepted to university because, in the opinion of the immigration judge, those individuals were not assimilated enough into the culture. 

This level of assimilation will also eventually be measured by a Dominican judge -- who sits in front of a giant crucifix, adhering to the Napoleonic code -- and her determination of assimilation may be completely arbitrary for the 21st century.

Eventually, the Haitians remaining in the Dominican Republic, the lucky few who are now legal residents, will be forced to prove assimilation. That time will come, and when it does, there will be a very prominent Dominican writer with a piece of paper signed by a Dutch judge, and that piece of paper will, very sadly, be used to justify that mass deportation. It may already be too late.