Abstract
This article examines major changes in the migratory policy of the Dominican Republic over the last decade, and how they possibly relate to the consolidation of racist perceptions of the Other, prevalent since the Haitian and Dominican independence wars in the early 19th century. Generally focusing on the intersection of politics, exclusion, and Otherness, the paper takes a multidisciplinary approach fundamentally focused on the juridical and legislative processes, whenever the rule of law is presented as a legitimizing vehicle through which racism is expressed. Considering the conceptual usefulness of migration as a threat, the article problematizes cultural and biologic understandings of Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic, and their legislative reduction to ‘bare life’. It finally examines the convenience of Haitian lives for the Dominican State, conditioned by de facto and de jure processes of exclusion.
Highlights
When considering the concept of human rights as a universal precept, one of the issues that still garner fierce resistance is the recognition of fundamental rights in the context of human mobility
Following the scientific and moral challenge of the biogenetic concept of race—brought in fundamentally from biologic anthropology—and within the framework of human rights, we have reached an impoverished state of important debates, insofar as, under the guise of political correctness, any reference derived from race, and any reflection on racism as an ideology, have been curtailed
We propose that the nationalist and anti-Haitian postulations that currently gain prominence as a transversal element of the social-political culture of the Republic are the result of 20th century political processes promoted under the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in 1930, and later pursued by president Joaquín Balaguer [5]
Summary
When considering the concept of human rights as a universal precept, one of the issues that still garner fierce resistance is the recognition of fundamental rights in the context of human mobility In this regard, and as part of the colonial inheritance of the State in the Americas, ingrained racism and. Racism is not referred to here in its biologic sense, rather in its social sense, as a necessary idealization determined by stereotypes charged by emotion, and in which knowledge about the Other is distorted to give way to exclusion. This analysis highlights the complex dynamics between xenophobia and racism
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