Hurricane Matthew hasn't even started killing people near the Haitian border yet, but Human Rights Watch already decided the Dominican Republic is somehow responsible.
Skye Wheeler, the writer of what essentially amounts to an open-border-promoting hit piece, claims that an area near the border known as Anse-a-Pitres is "one of the poorest and most remote" in Haiti, failing to point out that the country is a failed state and that the residents of Anse-a-Pitres are actually some of the wealthiest Haitians, owing to their international mobility and accumulation of languages and assets while residing abroad.
Ms. Wheeler then goes on to state that she couldn't "imagine many worse places to be when a hurricane dumps 40 inches of rain," despite the fact that Anse-a-Pitres is not in the direct path of the storm, and that its proximity to Dominican forest confers more protection for its residents than almost any other barren part of Haiti.
The brutal hit piece then continues by alleging that the Dominican Republic has "deported or pressured" 135,000 Haitians to leave, despite the fact that Dominican authorities never took part in mass deportations or in applying "pressure" as HRW exaggerates. In a country with one million undocumented Haitians, it is not unreasonable that 15,000 people per year are deported, and to demand any less is simply to ask that the Dominican government no longer carry out deportations of the undocumented, effectively ceding sovereignty and guaranteeing the erasure of the Dominican people in the face of an open border to a failed state with a fast-growing population.
The shamelessly juked statistics and images of "pressure" which Ms. Wheeler presents in her attack piece are then humanized with an anecdote about a pregnant woman named Lucille who claims she was deported for failure to have documents, despite the fact that the Dominican government was handing out documents for free to anyone who, like Lucille, claimed to have been born on Dominican soil and could prove it.
Apparently Ms. Lucille cannot prove that she was born on Dominican soil, or she did not make the efforts to prove so in 2014 after Congress passed law 169-14, granting residence permits to those born on Dominican soil who claimed to be Dominicans, permits which just this past July were handed out for free a second time to 142,000 people.
The first round of permits were handed out not just freely; little proof was required to acquire them. Yet this apparently isn't enough for the George Soros and Bill Clintons of the world, who stand to benefit from the misery that would befall the Dominican Republic should it open its border with Haiti and fail to deport pregnant, undocumented women like Lucille.
Human Rights Watch enjoys pointing out when a person like Lucille, born to parents who were both Haitian-born citizens, "doesn't feel Haitian," a point which, combined with Haitian unwillingness to recognize the foreign-born children of its citizens as the Haitian Constitution stipulates, means that the Dominican government is somehow to blame for this tragic identity crisis experienced by former irregular immigrants.
Licensed to kill abroad without fear of deportation. |
Lucille's parents were both born in Haiti as Haitian citizens; the Dominican government is under no obligation to recognize her as one of its citizens even if she were able to prove birth on Dominican soil. The fact that Lucille cannot acquire Haitian documentation is also not the fault of the Dominican government, as it is also not the fault of the US government that men like Jean Jacques are free to kill on its soil because the Haitian elite have promoted as prudent policy the export of 200,000 citizens per year, even if it means denying that they are Haitians.
Human Rights Watch doesn't like to point out individuals like Mr. Jacques because it would destroy the false narrative they have created of an evil Dominican government deporting people without documents, when it is in fact the Haitian government that refuses to take back killers and rapists.
Human "Rights" Watch is apparently not concerned about the right of the Dominican people to forge their own future, for not only do Dominicans have to give documents, freely, to people like Mr. Jacques or Lucille, they also apparently need to take responsibility for Lucille's inability to build quality-housing in her home country even years after being deported.