Anti-Haitianism and Statelessness in the

Caribbean
By
Daniel Joseph
E astern Kentucky Universit y
Bertin M. Louis Jr.
Universit y of Kentucky

Abstract
Statelessness affects an estimated 15 million people worldwide (Kosinski 2009, 377).
Without citizenship in the countries of their birth, stateless people lack access to basic
political and social rights, such as the right to vote, marry, travel, and own property; in
some cases, stateless people are also denied access to employment, educational services,
and health care (UNCHR 2021). In this article, we look at the growing global problem of
statelessness through the lens of anti-Haitianism and ethnographic analysis of people of
Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic, Anse-à-Pitres, Haïti, and New Providence,
Bahamas. [The Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Haiti, the Caribbean, anti-Haitianism,
statelessness]

Resumen
La apatridia afecta a unos 15 millones de personas en todo el mundo (Kosinski 2009,
377). Sin ciudadanía en los países de su nacimiento, las personas apátridas carecen de
acceso a los derechos políticos y sociales básicos, como el derecho a votar, casarse, viajar
y poseer propiedades; en algunos casos, a las personas apátridas también se les niega el
acceso al empleo, los servicios educativos y la atención médica (UNCHR 2021). En este
artículo, observamos el creciente problema mundial de la apatridia a través de la lente
del antihaitianismo y el análisis etnográfico de las personas de ascendencia haitiana
en la República Dominicana, Anse-á-Pitres, Haití y New Providence, Bahamas. [Las
Bahamas, República Dominicana, Haití, el Caribe, antihaitianismo, apatridia]

In 2013, the Dominican state upheld a constitutional amendment that stripped

thousands of Dominicans of Haitian origin of their citizenship. Forced to leave

The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 386–407. ISSN 1935-4932, online ISSN
1935-4940. © 2022 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/jlca.12617

386 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

the Dominican Republic due to this anti-Haitian decision, these people became
displaced in Haiti. Hundreds of people who found themselves stateless took res-
idence in Anse-à-Pitres, a small Haitian border town, located in the southeast
geographical department of Haiti. Daniel Joseph conducted fieldwork with this
displaced population between 2016 and 2017. He argues that while the Haitian
government promised to welcome this displaced population as siblings, the state-
lessness of these people continues in Anse-à-Pitres and has become a form of social
death, a condition that keeps these people marginalized and as outcasts of society,
which blatantly contradicts the state’s discourse.
Haitians are the largest migrant group in The Bahamas. The children of Haitian
migrants, popularly known as “Haitian-Bahamians,” are ascribed the nationality of
their parents at birth by the Bahamian state and are the largest group of people in
The Bahamas who do not hold Bahamian citizenship. These children are stateless,
meaning that they fall through the cracks created by a Bahamian legal appara-
tus that only recognizes Bahamian citizenship and does not automatically confer
citizenship to children born in The Bahamas. Bertin M. Louis Jr. conducted field-
work in New Providence, Bahamas (Nassau), in 2012 and 2018. He argues that
Haitian nationality is rendered ineffective in The Bahamas and is characterized
as the opposite of rights-bearing Bahamian citizens. This stems from Bahamian
anti-Haitianism.

Introduction

In September 2021, people worldwide were shocked to see images of thousands

of Haitians at the United States/Mexico border who were attempting to enter the
United States. Some of these scenes included pictures of Haitians appearing to be
whipped by US Border Patrol agents on horseback, conjuring images of the vio-
lent treatment of enslaved Africans during chattel slavery in the Caribbean and
Americas. After the negative media coverage of this situation, over 6,000 Haitian
asylum seekers were deported to Haiti in a matter of days (Pierre 2021). Many de-
nounced this mass deportation and violence at the border as racist, anti-Black, and
anti-Haitian.
The expulsion and mistreatment of Haitians are not unique to the United
States or Mexico. Essays from sociologist Regine O. Jackson’s edited volume
Geographies of the Haitian Diaspora (2011) discuss how Haitian migrants and
their progeny serve as repugnant cultural “others” in contradistinction to the
citizens of Jamaica, Guadeloupe, and Cuba. In Haiti, a 2010 post-earthquake
cholera outbreak introduced by Nepalese soldiers from the United Nations Stabi-
lization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) claimed nearly 10,000 Haitian lives and
affected more than 820,000 people (Lee et al. 2020); the United Nations remains

Anti-Haitianism and Statelessness in the Caribbean 387

 unaccountable and unpunished for this human rights catastrophe. This
anti-Haitian outcome is in addition to earthquake aid that did not go to Haitians
but mostly went to donors’ own civilian and military entities, UN agencies, inter-
national NGOs, and private contractors (Ramachandran and Walz 2013). Denise
Cogo and Terezinha Silva also observe the racist treatment of Haitians in Brazil
after Haitians were encouraged to migrate to Brazil to work as laborers ahead of
the 2016 Olympics (2019).
While we must address the differences in the local histories, varying socioeco-
nomic factors, and political situations of each country mentioned, a pattern that in-
cludes alienation, death, expulsion, elimination, humiliation, marginalization, and
stigmatization of Haitians emerges within the regional context of the Caribbean
and the larger context of the Western Hemisphere when reviewing news and schol-
arly publications (Louis 2015). Similar anti-Haitian patterns are prevalent in the
Dominican Republic—a mixed-race nation with a long-documented history of
antihaitianismo (Paulino 2016; Sagás 2000)—and The Bahamas, a small, predom-
inantly Black Caribbean nation renowned as a premier tourist destination.
While the Dominican Republic and The Bahamas are constituted by people
of African descent (i.e., Black) and subject to antiblackness themselves (when
Bahamians and Dominicans migrate to the United States and experience racial
prejudice due to their African origins, e.g.), both nations promote a form of
antiblackness we are naming as anti-Haitianism. Anti-Haitianism is related to
antihaitianismo (anti-Haitianism), a term that comes out of the context of the
Dominican Republic. Ernesto Sagás defines antihaitianismo as “a set of socially
reproduced anti-Haitian prejudices, myths and stereotypes prevalent in the cul-
tural makeup of the Dominican Republic” (2000, 4). We build on Sagás’s work to
discuss anti-Haitianism and its relation to statelessness, which is “a form of forced
displacement that takes place in situ” (Belton 2017, 15) in the context of our ethno-
graphic research among people of Haitian descent in the Caribbean (particularly
the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and The Bahamas).1 We view anti-Haitianism
as a regional (Caribbean) and hemispheric (Western) phenomenon and consists
of ideologies, outcomes, policies, political strategies, and practices that reify the
negative connotations associated with Blackness and Haitian nationality. It res-
onates with the pariah status Haiti and Haitians have been subjected to since the
Haitian Revolution (1791–1803) challenged the racist, anti-Black colonial order
of its time. In our research, we found that anti-Haitianism kept Haitians at the
lowest rungs of the Dominican Republic and The Bahamas. Statelessness, then,
is one of many negative outcomes—such as prejudice, discrimination, and lower
social status—that affect people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic,
The Bahamas and, in Joseph’s case study, Haiti. Haitians become blacker—with
all the negative connotations associated with Blackness stemming from the global
system of white supremacy (Beliso-De Jesús and Pierre 2019), which also helps to

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structure relations within the Caribbean—than Dominicans and Bahamians, two
other populations of African descent, and are treated as racialized Black inferiors.
In Joseph’s case study, Haitian statelessness is produced through expulsion
from the Dominican Republic and marginalization within Haiti. Denationalization
serves as an anti-Haitian strategy that contributes to Dominican national identity
(what it means to be a Dominican citizen in relation to a repugnant Haitian cultural
other), fortifies Dominican nationalism, and serves as a way for the Dominican
nation-state to assert its sovereignty. In Louis’s Bahamian research, statelessness is
produced due to Bahamian nationality law, the growing Haitian population in The
Bahamas, lack of parental documentation for children of Haitian parentage, and a
strategy of Black Bahamian political elites of constructing Haitians as Black unas-
similable others. Ultimately, these factors coalesce to produce Haitian statelessness
in a society where Haitian identity is highly stigmatized and associated with “illegal
status, poor education and poverty” (Fielding et al. 2008, 38). The marginalization
and stigmatization of Haitians in The Bahamas contribute to Bahamian national
identity (what it means to be a Bahamian citizen in relation to a repugnant Haitian
cultural other), fortifies Bahamian nationalism, and also reflects how the Bahamian
nation-state asserts its sovereignty that, at many times, is exercised over Haitian
and Haitian-descended people. Both case studies reflect hierarchialized blackness
and how people of African descent also perpetuate antiblackness.
Joseph conducted fieldwork between 2016 and 2017 in Anse-à-Pitres, a small
town located on the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic and sepa-
rated by a short footbridge from its Dominican sister city, Pedernales. Joseph con-
ducted participant observation at various places, including at migrant camps, in
downtown Anse-à-Pitres, at the binational market located on the Dominican side
of the border, and at the Catholic Church. He interviewed eighty-six people, in-
cluding forced migrants and long-term residents in Anse-à-Pitres, and organized
focus groups with them. In addition, he served as a volunteer at the Service Jésuite
aux Migrants (SJM), a nonprofit organization collaborating with several Haitian
migrant groups in Anse-à-Pitres since 2013.
Louis draws from ethnographic fieldwork, which includes twenty interviews in
total and participant observation, about Haitian statelessness in New Providence,
Bahamas, conducted in 2012 and 2018. In 2012, Louis conducted ten formal inter-
views with people of Haitian descent born in The Bahamas of mixed legal status
(stateless Haitians and Bahamians of Haitian descent). He also conducted partici-
pant observation at Haitian Evangelical Churches and served as a consultant for the
Nationality Support Unit, a body created under the purview of the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to assist stateless people who were
aged eighteen and older on the path of becoming citizens of The Bahamas (Louis
2021). In 2018, he formally interviewed another ten Bahamians and Bahamians of
Haitian descent about statelessness, Bahamian identity, and perceptions of Haitians

Anti-Haitianism and Statelessness in the Caribbean 389

 in The Bahamas. He also informally interviewed Bahamians about Bahamian so-
ciety in New Providence and conducted participant observation on Bay Street, an
important road that runs through Nassau and has tourist shops, markets, and the
parliament of The Bahamas.
Together, Joseph and Louis offer two case studies that reflect how statelessness,
in the case of Haitian-descended people, is an outcome of anti-Haitianism. Both
case studies reflect Caribbean and hemispheric anti-Haitian patterns of marginal-
ization and, ultimately, the denial of the human rights of Haitians. We begin with
Joseph’s research.

Haitians in the Dominican Republic

For many decades, Haitians have been part of Dominican society and have consti-
tuted the very center of economic life in the various Dominican border economies
(Derby 1994). The importance of Haitians as a productive force in the Dominican
economy is corroborated by a survey conducted by the National Office of Plan-
ning (ONAPLAN), which found that there were around 16,000 pickers during the
harvest of 1980, which represents 29 percent of total salaried workers (Grasmuck
1982, 372). The economic, environmental, and political instability of Haiti has led
to the exploitation and expropriation of thousands of Haitian peasants during the
29 years of dictatorship (1957–1986) imposed by the Duvalier regime (Joseph
2021). This context encouraged Haitian labor migration throughout the Caribbean
region and benefited the Dominican economy. However, Haitians have been per-
ceived and treated as undesired, racialized others incapable of assimilating (Román
and Sagás 2017) and, as a result, have been exposed to a hostile social and political
environment that works more to exclude than include them. Despite their shared
history of colonialism, slavery, economic cooperation, and “moments of collab-
oration and convergences of interests among Haitians and Dominicans” (Mayes
and Jayaram 2018, 2), the relationship between Haitian and Dominican people
is fraught with violence and discord. The invasion of the Dominican Republic
by the Haitian army that reunified the two countries for 22 years (1822–44) has
been a subject of hostility between the two countries. This period, characterized as
“Haitian Domination” (Martínez-Vergne 2005) in Dominican history, has given
rise to an anti-Haitian sentiment referred to as antihaitianismo. This ideology
evolved from colonial times to a state-sponsored ideology during the dictatorship
of General Rafael Trujillo (1930–61) (Román and Sagás 2017, 41) who used the
Haitian invasion as a justification for pushing its anti-Haitian stance by blaming
“Haitianization” for the Dominican Republic’s lack of progress (Hintzen 2016).
Trujillo considered the presence of Haitians on the border and their acceptance
by Dominican border residents a threat to his consolidation of political control
(Hintzen 2016). In 1937, Trujillo ordered the massacre of 15,000–20,000 people of

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Haitian origin to, among other objectives, eradicate Haitian-Dominican commu-
nities, assert the authority of the central government over local officials, and create
an official nationhood by pitting Dominicans against an abstract other (Hintzen
2016, 42–43; Sagás 2000).
This anti-Haitian sentiment and other elements of colonial legacy (such as
race) are manifest in the process of Dominican nation-building. It is used and
exploited by the ruling elite to negate, downplay, and discard blackness (de Kalaf
2021). Accordingly, the notion of Dominican identity is associated with hispanidad
and race mixture and simply means not Haitian (Howard 2001), which reinforced
deep-rooted stereotypes that associate Haitians with Africanness (Simmons 2010)
and Dominicans with Europeanness and hispanidad. This rejection of Haitianness
continued in the form of structural violence that are social and economic structures
that work to prevent Haitians from integrating into Dominican society (Galtung
1969, cited by Simmons 2010). Some forms of this structural violence are expressed
in the way people of Haitian origin are unprotected by the law (Martínez 1995), ar-
bitrarily mistreated by employers (Matibag and Downing-Matibag 2011), and have
to live under the fear of deportation and harassment from Dominican authorities
(Román and Sagás 2017). This politics of institutionalized violence that aims at re-
moving Haitians from the country constitutes a sword of Damocles on Haitians
as evidenced by the decision called la sentencia, the constitutional amendment
adopted by the Dominican state in 2013 that rendered stateless tens of thousands
of Haitian-Dominicans and forced them out of the country in 2015.

La sentencia; or, The Legal Context Surrounding the Statelessness of

Haitian-Dominicans
Until 2010, the Dominican Republic had recognized jus soli, which allowed anyone
born on Dominican soil to be Dominican—except children of people in transit,
such as tourists or diplomats—to be entitled with birthright citizenship. This right
to citizenship is mentioned in Article 11 of the Dominican constitution, which
states “all persons born in the territory of the Dominican Republic” are Domini-
can citizens (Human Rights Watch 2002). However, children born of Haitian par-
ents have been the object of discrimination and were excluded from automatic
citizenship of the country, as they were asked for additional documents such as
a birth attestation from the hospital’s maternity ward and parents’ proof of citi-
zenship in order to be provided with a birth certificate. Those requirements were
difficult to satisfy, as the process is discriminatory. For example, registrars often
refused to accept that a Black person of Haitian descent is Dominican. According
to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Haitians were living in a
state of permanent illegality (Human Rights Watch 2002), as Dominican authori-
ties see children as heirs of their parents’ “irregular” status (Wooding 2009). As a

Anti-Haitianism and Statelessness in the Caribbean 391

 result of the denial of birth certificates and of the lack of other legal documents to
establish Dominican citizenship or nationality, most Dominicans born of Haitian
parents are regarded as foreign national subjects and are vulnerable to abuse from
employers and agents of the state (Wooding and Mosley-Williams 2004).
Those discriminatory practices have been institutionalized and legally sanc-
tioned when, in 2010, the Dominican state passed a constitutional reform that
denies Dominican nationality to children born in the Dominican Republic to
undocumented Haitian parents. In 2013, the Dominican Constitutional Court
upheld this 2010 amendment, revoking birthright citizenship to children of undoc-
umented Haitians and also stripping tens of thousands of Haitian-Dominicans of
their citizenship (Hazel 2014). The Constitutional Court decided to apply this de-
cision, called “la sentencia,” to all those who were born of undocumented parents
who had entered the country since 1929, denationalizing over 130,000 Domini-
cans of mainly Haitian ancestry (Wooding 2021). This legal measure describes the
double standard of Dominican politics, whereby the state adopted dual citizen-
ship to incorporate members of the Dominican diaspora in the nation while it
narrows and (re)defines Dominican citizenship to exclude thousands of Haitian-
Dominicans (Román and Sagás 2017, 37). Without a nationality, these people be-
come stateless, which exposes them to multiple forms of vulnerability, precarity,
and displacement. Following this decision, Haitian-Dominicans who had resided
in the country for many generations were no longer considered Dominican by the
state and could not have recourse to any form of legal procedure to acquire Do-
minican nationality.
This decision implied devastating consequences for these people and their fam-
ilies, who found themselves in the same category as people in transit in the Domini-
can Republic at the time of birth (Human Rights 2002, 22). According to Amnesty
International, “a large number of these people consider the Dominican Republic
as their country, since they were born there and lived there all their life. Often,
they have no connection with Haiti, have never been there, and can barely speak
Haitian Creole. Many of them are the children or grandchildren of people who are
also born on Dominican soil. For these families, the Dominican Republic has been
their homeland for generations” (2015, 6).
Many of these people who have been in the country for a long time working
and establishing families (Amnesty International 2015) have simply been turned
into foreigners in their own country (Petrozziello 2019). This forced tens of thou-
sands of these stateless people along with other undocumented Haitian migrants
to depart from the Dominican Republic between 2015 and 2016. These people
are forced migrants, displaced peoples. In Haiti, hundreds became displaced and
started residence in the border town of Anse-à-Pitres, expecting to eventually ob-
tain a legal document and be conferred a birth certificate and Haitian nationality.

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Statelessness in Practice and Structural Challenges for Forced Migrants
In general, forced migrants have always faced challenges to obtain a birth certifi-
cate in the Dominican Republic. Many research consultants interviewed by Joseph
confessed that they were denied a birth certificate or a cédula (Dominican iden-
tity card). While many who were born in the Dominican Republic had a constitu-
tional right to nationality, this right was frequently denied to them (Wooding and
Mosley-Williams 2004, 15). When a child is born, parents need to obtain a paper
that identifies the date and location of the birth of their children from the hospi-
tal’s maternity ward, which was difficult to obtain (Joseph 2019). Without such a
document, parents were not able to register their children. This further demon-
strates the attempt to perpetuate the state of “foreignness” and nonbelonging of
Dominicans of Haitian background (de Kalaf 2021).
With those structural barriers in place, Haitian-Dominicans have little room
to legally claim their belonging to the Dominican nation-state. For instance, con-
sider Kesnel (pseudonym), a young man who was born in the Dominican Republic
where he did informal jobs to make a living. He was living a peaceful life until Do-
minicans started to threaten him and eventually forced him to leave the country
in June 2015. Kesnel’s efforts to obtain a cédula were in vain. He said: “I was born
in Abila (D.R.). I don’t have a cédula because it is difficult to obtain. Well, I can
say that even Panyòl [Dominicans without Haitian background] don’t have it. I
did everything I could, but I couldn’t get it because it is so hard. Not having it is
a problem for me, but I don’t have it; there is nothing I could do. It is not because
of a lack of effort that I don’t have it. I did everything I could, but the fact is that I
couldn’t have it. This is very hard.”
What Kesnel describes is part of a larger set of discriminatory practices that
Haitian-Dominicans experience in the Dominican Republic, which has rejected
them and made their integration both a social and a legal impossibility as evi-
denced in the application of this constitutional amendment that encourages forms
of exclusion. The reinforcement of these structural barriers undermines Haitian-
Dominicans’ basic human rights and demonstrates how their many years of con-
tribution to the country have been downplayed. These conditions continued to
affect their lives in Anse-à-Pitres, which lacks the legal institutions to confer legal
identity and to help them reduce the grave consequences of statelessness.
In fact, the civil registry in Anse-à-Pitres, which is responsible for registering
birth, marriage, and death certificates, faces many structural challenges because
of the lack of state funding. According to the civil registrar, a 60-year-old man, the
state does not provide the necessary resources to work. As a result, a great part of
the population is struggling to obtain a legal document like the rest of Haiti. Gen-
erally, issuing birth certificates in Haiti has been political and was often a cause of
the marginalization of peasants. Political leaders often focused on the urban area

Anti-Haitianism and Statelessness in the Caribbean 393

 and abandoned the countryside. This may explain why Anse-à-Pitres, a distant
area from the city of Jacmel, has so many undocumented people. Therefore, forced
migrants face serious challenges to obtain a birth certificate in Anse-à-Pitres. The
stateless forced migrants are composed of people who are de jure and effectively
stateless. De jure stateless refers to those people who are without a nationality
because they were not able to register their birth in the Dominican Republic
and were thus made stateless by the Dominican state. Effective statelessness refers
to those people who are nationals of Haiti but do not have formal documents
to establish their nationality. This article focuses on those who came from the
Dominican Republic without any legal identity documents and found themselves
to be de jure stateless. It is clear that whatever the category migrants belong to, their
statelessness is not without consequences on their already precarious conditions.

Marginalization or Social Death? The Consequences of Statelessness

Upon their arrival in Haiti, these forced migrants were promised a warm welcome
by the Haitian government by its former president, Michel J. Martelly, and Prime
Minister Evans Paul (Alphonse 2015; Louis 2015). However, a year after this state-
ment, the migrant population in Anse-à-Pitres was living in conditions of state-
lessness and social and economic marginalization. They arrived in a country eco-
nomically and politically deteriorated and that had undergone great environmental
change in previous decades (Bartlett 2012). When they first came, some organi-
zations, such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM), assisted the
migrants with relocation. However, once they were relocated, they felt increasingly
forgotten even by the same organization that promised to provide more support to
start a new life. For instance, in many cases, rooms, where some people were stay-
ing, were empty without any basic furniture such as chairs and beds. Further, many
of the forced migrants had moving testimonies, including one woman who stated:
“They asked us to not put anything in the house, but they never sent us anything.
So, we are sleeping on the floor like this, no bed.” While they were grateful to the
IOM, their futures continued to be uncertain, as the IOM did not renew rent for
them. This reflects the degree of precarity and vulnerability in which these people
were living. It also demonstrates how they were forgotten by the state that wel-
comed them. This abandonment by the state and the withdrawal of organizations
from their cause shows how they are by-and-large the unwanted, pushed to the
margins both spatially and subjectively (Koch 2015).
Statelessness violates basic human rights, denying people living under these
conditions access to social and economic benefits and the ability to obtain
documents corresponding to their status (Walker 1981). In view of this assump-
tion, the absence of a birth certificate, a basic legal document that confers a nation-
ality, expels stateless forced migrants from humanity (Lechte and Newman 2013)

394 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

in a world, where the absence of demonstrable legal identity is a grave handicap
(Bhabha 2011, 13). In Anse-à-Pitres, statelessness exposes forced migrants to a
form of social death that is antithetical to social value. In other terms, stateless
forced migrants in Anse-à-Pitres are denied “the rights to have rights, (Ribas 2014,
6)” which is a denial of personhood, thus a form of social death (Ribas 2014).
The location of these people in the spaces of social death (Ribas 2014) is sanc-
tioned through their exclusion from society because of their inability to perform
civic and legal obligations. Effectively, the lack of a birth certificate prevents forced
migrants from benefiting from public services and establishing legal families in
Anse-à-Pitres. For instance, in an informal conversation with a man named Lizinò
(pseudonym), who lived in a migrant camp in Anse-à-Pitres after he was forced
to leave the Dominican Republic, he mentioned that he had planned to get mar-
ried for a long time, but this could not work for him because neither him nor his
prospective bride had a birth certificate. As a result, they were forced to postpone
the wedding until a couple of months later, even though they were not guaranteed
to get the certificate before the due time. If they did not, they would not be able to
get married because the birth certificate is required by the church to register the
wedding at the civil registry. Legal identity remains a crucial tool in development
planning to ensure that populations can access basic rights and services (de Kalaf
2019, 2). In this sense, statelessness has affected forced migrants’ social and human
development. At the SJM office, one forced migrant woman from one of the camps
explained the situation of her children who did not possess birth certificates: “The
Haitian national school asked them [the children] for papers, but we didn’t have
any. They didn’t even have birth certificates.” The refusal of the school to accept
these children reminds us of the general situation that parents experienced in the
Dominican Republic, as underlined by Amnesty International (2015): “The right
to education is essential to human development. It is recognized by all regional
and international conventions relating to human rights of which the Dominican
Republic is part, and by Dominican law. However, in practice, the full enjoyment
of this right is regularly denied to stateless children and without a birth certificate.”
In practice, anti-Haitianism led to their expulsion and statelessness marginal-
izes these people. It is common for them to compare their lives to those of animals.
For instance, during a focus group with the SJM at Fond-Jeannette, a small locality
in the region, a young boy stated, “my birth certificate is a false copy and people ask
me if I am a goat.” These kinds of stories are very common among people in Anse-
à-Pitres attributing not having a birth certificate to not existing because the state
does not recognize them, and they seem to belong to nowhere. The challenges that
these are facing is a continuity of their disenfranchisement and dehumanization
in the Dominican Republic, where most were not allowed access to the necessary
civic, cultural, economic, or social resources to become full members of society
(Matibag and Downing-Matibag 2011, 100).

Anti-Haitianism and Statelessness in the Caribbean 395

 In 2016, the alarming situation of stateless people has drawn the attention of the
SJM and has implemented a documentation program called PwoKontram (Protect
People’s Work Conditions) to help vulnerable people in Anse-à-Pitres, including
the stateless forced migrants, obtain a birth certificate with the support of Catholic
Relief Service (CRS) and the US Department of Labor (USDOL). Joseph partic-
ipated in most of the activities undertaken by the SJM, such as organizing focus
groups with people to talk about the importance of documentation and register-
ing people for birth certificates. After a year, a few forced migrants obtained a birth
certificate while others waited for theirs. Despite this support from the SJM, doc-
umenting people remains the responsibility of the state. However, with the inca-
pacity and passivity of the state and the structural challenges faced by the civil
registry, the statelessness of many forced migrants is likely to continue, exacerbat-
ing the precarity and uncertainty of their lives and leaving them hanging in spaces
of social death. Precarity and uncertainty are terms that also reflect this situation
of stateless people of Haitian descent in The Bahamas.

Haitians in The Bahamas

Haitians migrate from their home country during periods of intense political and
economic turmoil and environmental degradation to countries throughout the
Americas and the Caribbean, such as The Bahamas. Most Haitians migrate to the
island of New Providence, where Nassau, the capital, and the majority of the Ba-
hamian population is located. Haitians constitute the largest immigrant group in
the country with a population of just over 400,000. Many, if not most, are undocu-
mented workers employed as restaurant staff, construction workers, housekeepers,
and landscapers. This population has become highly stigmatized due to continued
Haitian migration to The Bahamas, negative media reports concerning Haitians,
a lack of research conducted about the Haitian population of The Bahamas, Ba-
hamian xenophobia, and Bahamian governmental policies enacted to limit and
stigmatize a Haitian population perceived as too large and unassimilable. Haitians
are also viewed as a threat to the sovereignty and social stability of The Bahamas.
The Bahamas, then, is a majority Black country where its people are very hostile
toward Haitians, a majority Black people.
The Bahamas gained political independence from its British colonial master
through a relatively peaceful transition of power on July 9, 1973. Tourism, which
became the major economic strategy of modernization after Bahamian indepen-
dence (Alexander 1997, 67), accounts for 60 percent of the nation’s gross domestic
product and employs half of the Bahamian labor force. This makes the per capita
income of The Bahamas one of the highest in the Caribbean and Latin America.
Although The Bahamas is comparatively more affluent than many of its Caribbean

396 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

neighbors, the Bahamian economy is subject to similar moments of uncertainty
other countries experience as part of the global economy.
The Bahamas was also battered by a past event and an ongoing crisis. The past
event was Hurricane Dorian. The ongoing crisis is the global COVID-19 pandemic
which started in 2019. According to the National Hurricane Center, Dorian was the
strongest recorded hurricane to hit The Bahamas. This catastrophic event claimed
the lives of an estimated seventy people and left an estimated 76,000 people in
The Bahamas homeless (approximately 17 percent of the Bahamian population)
as Dorian rendered parts of some Bahamian islands uninhabitable. The ongo-
ing coronavirus pandemic has wrought havoc on The Bahamas, infecting close to
34,000 people and claiming 800 lives. COVID-19 adversely affected The Bahamas’
tourism-driven economy due to the curtailment of travel necessary to reduce the
spread of the deadly virus.2 So, The Bahamas is not a paradise for the average Ba-
hamian and definitely not for its Haitian population.
The Bahamas is also a predominantly Black nation; approximately 85 percent
of the population is African-descended. Bahamian identity is diverse and con-
tains African, American, British, Gullah, and Haitian elements. This hybrid back-
ground stems from a history of slavery, migration throughout the Caribbean, and
in-migration from other Caribbean areas. Bahamian culture also shares features
with other cultures within the region that situate it as part of a larger African dias-
pora. The Junkanoo celebration and Bahamian storytelling are examples of a cul-
ture that has African origins (Johnson 1991, 17).
The Bahamas also prides itself on being a Christian nation, where the major-
ity of the inhabitants (96 percent) observe and practice Catholic and Protestant
forms of Christianity. As Dean Collinwood reflects, the most notable features of
Bahamian life—conscience development, mate selection and marriage, and vital
social activities—take place within the confines of the church (Collinwood and
Dodge 1989, 16). While Christianity plays a significant role in constituting a core
element of contemporary Bahamian identity, another aspect that helps to construct
it is the tendency for Bahamians to be xenophobic.
As Howard Johnson (1991, 17) observes, resentment of foreigners is a long-
standing tradition within Bahamian culture and provides an element of cohesion
within a society long separated according to class, color, and race. A historical mo-
ment where a distrust of foreigners occurred was during the 1920s, when skilled
West Indian laborers arrived to work in the growing tourist industry. Bahamian
xenophobia during that period culminated in 1926, when flows of West Indian la-
borers were curtailed due to a decrease in labor opportunities. This xenophobia
would be directed toward people of Haitian descent during the transition to the
Bahamian postindependence period.

Anti-Haitianism and Statelessness in the Caribbean 397

 Anti-Haitianism as Black Bahamian Political Strategy
After their election to the House of Assembly, the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP),
which rose to become the first majority Black Bahamian political party in power
after independence in 1973, shifted from antiracist rhetoric against the United
Bahamian Party (UBP), a party which represented the political interests of the
white Bahamian oligarchy, to a focus on immigration through anti-Haitian senti-
ments. Charmane Perry (2014) identifies the PLP’s turn as influenced by colonial-
ity, long-standing patterns of power emerging from colonialism that define culture,
labor, and knowledge production within postindependence societies, and race.
As Haitian migration to The Bahamas increased post-1967, Haitians performed
essential functions in the Bahamian economy, which in the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries came to be known as Haitian work (housekeeping and
landscaping, e.g.).
Coloniality plays a vital role in the perception of the treatment of Haitians by
Bahamians as well as upholding an overall Bahamian tradition of antiblackness
started by the British, maintained by Bahamian whites, and now continued by
Black Bahamians. The key here is that it is now Black Bahamians who are cen-
tral to creation and maintenance of a form of antiblackness in the oppression of
Haitians, here referred to as anti-Haitianism. Perry writes that Haitians in The Ba-
hamas “are the racialized, inferior, and non-human other. Afro-Bahamians, once
considered inferior by the white minority, became superior and more human in
the post-independence period and in turn dominated and controlled Haitians”
(Perry 2014, 3). Racial capitalism then explains “the mutually constitutive nature
of racialization and capitalist exploitation” (Burden-Stelly 2020) of Haitians in The
Bahamas and how they are systemically categorized as “Haitian” and, by extension,
socially (and in some cases, biologically as we will see and infer from Jocelyne’s in-
terview excerpt) inferior within Bahamian society. As Perry argues, race and the
division of labor are structurally related. “Haitians (who have already been histori-
cally racialized and demonized as inferior) are considered non-human, performing
the most menial jobs which, in the lens of coloniality, is a social and political justifi-
cation for their domination and exploitation by Black Bahamians” (Perry 2014, 3).
By the time of Bahamian independence in 1973 (July 10), The Bahamas was
concerned with increasing immigration. This was a “reflection of the PLP’s na-
tional objective of protecting The Bahamas for Bahamians, particularly black Ba-
hamians” (Perry 2014, 6). Black Bahamians had unprecedented political power and
subsequent immigration policies from this period should be viewed as reflections
of how to maintain their social power. The immigration act of 1964, sponsored
by the United Bahamian Party, “prohibited the employment of foreigners without
the authorization of the Bahamian government (2014, 6).” Work by foreigners in
The Bahamas was also governed by the work permit program. Bahamianization

398 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

policy, implemented by the PLP in 1967, was another tool fashioned to protect
the livelihoods of the average Bahamian against immigrant labor. Perry observes
that Bahamianization was created “to provide Bahamians with the opportunity to
gain better employment and business opportunities by limiting the availability and
accessibility of work permits, permanent residency, and citizenship. Bahamianiza-
tion also required that employers hire Bahamians over non-Bahamians. Only if
a qualified Bahamian could not be found were employers allowed to hire foreign
labor” (2014, 6). But the key development that led to the systemic oppression of
people of Haitian descent in The Bahamas and their racialization as inferior and,
in some cases, blacker than the average Black Bahamian was the postindependence
transition of The Bahamas from “jus soli to jus sanguinis in its citizenship and nat-
uralization policies” (2014, 7).
The Independence Constitution of 1973 stated that those born in The Bahamas
before July 10, 1973, were eligible for Bahamian citizenship. However, those born
in The Bahamas after July 9, 1973, to non-Bahamian parents were not granted au-
tomatic citizenship (Perry 2014, 7). This meant that those born in The Bahamas to
non-Bahamian parents after July 9, 1973, were rendered noncitizens until the age of
eighteen, when they had the possibility to become a citizen through an application
process. So, citizenship serves as a crucial site of inclusion, exclusion, and racial-
ization, which further stigmatizes the nationality and race (Black) of Haitians and
produces anti-Haitian outcomes while influencing constructions of what it means
to be a Bahamian.

Citizenship, De Facto Statelessness, and the “Haitian-Bahamian”

A person has an automatic right to Bahamian citizenship if they are born in The
Bahamas and either of their parents is Bahamian, if they are born overseas to a
married Bahamian man, or born overseas to an unwed Bahamian woman. Chil-
dren born in The Bahamas to foreign parents can apply for Bahamian citizenship
within twelve months of their eighteenth birthday. According to Executive Direc-
tor at the Caribbean Institute for Human Rights and human rights lawyer Annette
Martinez, national legislation on citizenship, which includes the Constitution of
the Commonwealth of The Bahamas (1973 Constitution), the 1973 Bahamas Cit-
izenship Act, and other administrative regulations contain many gaps that can re-
sult in de facto statelessness (Martinez 2015).3
As a result of this legal apparatus, people born in The Bahamas of Haitian
parentage are assigned the nationality of their parents (Haitian) and are socially
recognized as such. They are referred to as “Haitian” or sometimes as “Haitian-
Bahamian” on a normative basis. Haitian migrants are regularized through work
permit programs and can become permanent residents of The Bahamas, a de-
cision that can be rescinded by the Bahamian government at any time. An

Anti-Haitianism and Statelessness in the Caribbean 399

 immigration policy that started November 1, 2014, requires every person in The
Bahamas, including children, to have a passport and led to the deportation of
“4,628 foreigners—3,814 of whom were Haitian—for the period January 1 to De-
cember 31, 2014” (Turnquest 2015). This adversely affects Haitian children who
are born in The Bahamas and would like to become citizens of the country of their
birth but live as “noncitizen insiders” (Belton 2017, 50).
De facto statelessness severely limits the life chances of people of Haitian de-
scent in The Bahamas. According to Louby Georges, International Organization
of Migration (IOM) Bahamas Protection Officer, stateless people in The Bahamas
cannot open a bank account, start a business, purchase a home or property, travel
outside the country due to the fact that they do not possess a Bahamian passport,
rendering them noncitizens with limited rights prescribed by the Bahamian consti-
tution or vote (Louby Georges, pers. comm. 2021). Stateless people in The Bahamas
also cannot enroll for national insurance (a social security program), which pro-
vides income replacement when a person experiences sickness, invalidity, mater-
nity, retirement, death, industrial injury/disease, and involuntary loss of income.
Even though the Bahamian constitution prescribes that all children within its bor-
ders are entitled to an education in government (public) schools, many Haitian-
descended children of school age do not register for school.
De facto statelessness in The Bahamas also means that people cannot be
employed in occupations that require Bahamian citizenship, which leaves them
vulnerable to various forms of exploitation. In June 2012, Louis interviewed an
18-year-old woman named Jocelyne (pseudonym), who wanted to study biology
and chemistry at the College of The Bahamas (now University of The Bahamas).
Although she was born in The Bahamas, she had no identification (no passport, no
travel documents) because her parents had never obtained documentation on her
behalf; she was unable to enroll at the school because she was considered to be a
Haitian national. Kristy A. Belton observes that lack of parental documentation is
a large problem among irregular migrants and another reason for potential state-
lessness in The Bahamas, which passes on insecure status to their children (2017,
72–73).
Jocelyne discussed a job she had in January 2012 that reflects how de facto
stateless people of Haitian descent are vulnerable to economic exploitation. This
also includes precarious working conditions:

I worked for one Jamaican guy and he just—and he had—he only has Haitian work-
ers working for him. And I don’t think those people even have like residence or
anything—or work permits to be in The Bahamas. That’s why he pays us—and he
pays us in cash. And we don’t get paid national insurance, we don’t even get paid
minimum wage. And we worked ten-hour days, six days a week [for 3 dollars an
hour].

400 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

 And so, I was working there—even though I used to get a bit of commission off
the sales I made, it still wasn’t—I don’t think it was worth it—and the way he was
treating them, he treated them as if they were some type of subspecies.

I mean, I know that people make mistakes, but I don’t think you should yell at them
and call them illiterate and call them like dogs and stuff like that. Because one time,
the specific day that I quit, it was a rainy day—it was a rainy Saturday the day that I
quit—but I already told him that I would be leaving because the conditions weren’t
safe, because we didn’t have a real cash register, and we all had money on us at all
times. And most of the—for most of the day he wouldn’t be in the store. He would
be making deliveries. And only females working in the kitchen, and one guy. So, I
don’t think like there’s any safety at all, no bars or anything. So, I told him the day
before I would be leaving that Saturday would be my last day. I would work full day
and then I would come back Monday for my pay. And it was raining that morning,
and in the morning, I sell the patties in a, like, a vending stand by the road to passing
vehicles and stuff. But how it was wet, and how I sit there, like, how the water settles
and stuff, I would be getting splashed all the time! So, I told him that I don’t think
I should go outside this morning because of how wet it is, and it was still raining.

So, he told me that, “when all those Haitians were coming over from the boat,
were they complaining about any water?” And I just couldn’t believe that he said
that when Haitians came over, they weren’t complaining about any water, and then
they’re trying to do some for y’all and y’all always complaining and stuff. I didn’t
take it. I didn’t see it the way he saw it. And so, I left that day.

Jocelyne’s former employee intentionally paid Haitians below the 2012 Ba-
hamian minimum hourly wage of Bahamian $4.45.4 Her former employer ver-
bally abused her and the people who worked for him, treating them, in her words,
like “some type of subspecies”—a category below species, indicating inferiority at
the biological and social level although both groups (Jamaican and Haitian) are
of African descent (both Black). And when Jocelyne decided to stop working for
him because of the dangerous working conditions of her job, her former employer
belittled the fact that she was being splashed by water by discussing the stereotyp-
ical view that when some Haitians came to The Bahamas by boat, they were not
complaining about the water in the ocean. In fact, there have been regular cases
of Haitians dying by drowning when their boats capsized at sea on the way to The
Bahamas and the United States. Within this context, we can see how callous and
humiliating her former employer’s comments were.
This is one of many stories that convey the indignities and marginalization
that de facto stateless people of Haitian descent in The Bahamas experience. A
stigmatized and easily exploited population apparently is a prerequisite for democ-
racies like The Bahamas and the United States within a global system of capitalist

Anti-Haitianism and Statelessness in the Caribbean 401

 accumulation. A certain form of racialization has taken place in The Bahamas
that creates the category of the Black “Haitian” as inferior through laws, physical
enforcement of those laws through jailing, surveillance, and extortion (bribes for
being released from jail) perpetuated by other Black people (Bahamians and in this
example, a Jamaican). By extension, these are some of the features of a Bahamian
anti-Haitianism, a form of antiblackness prevalent throughout the Western
Hemisphere.

Conclusion: Anti-Haitianism as Strategy, Citizenship as Exclusion, and

Citizenship as Temporary Solution

The ruling by the Dominican Constitutional Court against people of Haitian de-
scent is part of a politics of Black exclusion. Black people have been manipulated
in regimes of identification and defined as racial or cultural outsiders (Huffman
2013). When the citizenship of Black people—descendants of the formerly en-
slaved and children of the once-colonized—were not delimited, circumscribed,
curtailed, and revoked, they were only considered second-class citizens (Walcott
2021). This rejection of blackness leads to question the freedom that people of
African descent have acquired through centuries of great challenges and their ac-
ceptance in societies. Bridget Brereton and Kevin Yelvington argue “by the end
of 19th century, if Caribbean people were indeed free, everywhere they were in
chains (1999, 10).” The statelessness and forced migration of tens of thousands of
Haitian-Dominicans is part of a history of structural violence against Black peo-
ple. Part of this exclusion is that Haitians have become the scapegoat of the social
and economic inequalities produced by the neoliberal strategies of the Dominican
state to incorporate the country into the global economy.
In the Bahamian case, it is apparent that elite Black Bahamians, specifically in
the form of the Progressive Liberal Party—a predominantly Black political party—
did not dismantle the system of oppression they inherited from the United Ba-
hamian Party or create more equitable relations between two groups of African
descent (Bahamian and Haitian). The PLP decided to exclude Haitian migrants
and their progeny perpetuating the oppressive architecture of the UBP, a political
party that advanced the desires of a white oligarchy. This anti-Haitian tradition
continued under the predominantly Black Free National Movement (FNM) party,
which repatriated vulnerable Haitians to Haiti in the wake of the havoc Hurricane
Dorian wrought in The Bahamas in 2019.
Both case studies reflect the hemispheric rejection of Haitians since the suc-
cess of the Haitian Revolution. This is a reaction that automatically oppresses and
rejects people of Haitian descent. These Haitian diasporas are marginalized and
stigmatized like Haitians in other parts of Latin America, such as Guyana (Trotz

402 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

2019), Jamaica, Guadeloupe, and Cuba (Jackson 2011), the Dominican Republic
(Simmons 2010), and elsewhere.
In particular, the anti-Haitianism of both the Dominican and Bahamian states
reflect the logics of France and the United States, who were threatened by the ex-
istence of a free Haiti and never have seen or treated people of African descent as
equals but primarily as agents of extraction, exploitation, and disposability. The
Haitian state is also implicated in anti-Haitianism as well as reflecting the fail-
ures of the nation-state. Joseph’s case study reveals the limits and inability of the
Haitian state to create conditions for Haitian-descended people to live lives of dig-
nity within Haiti. This leads us to believe that the nation-state is not the optimal
form of social organization to deliver basic human rights in an anti-Black capitalist
global order.
The statelessness produced by anti-Haitianism in the Dominican Republic and
The Bahamas is a solvable problem; citizenship should be granted to the noncit-
izens living in Haiti and The Bahamas detailed in this ethnographic inquiry. In
a report prepared for the Swiss Initiative to Commemorate the 60th Anniversary
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Blitz and Lynch 2009), it offers
comparative qualitative data about statelessness from Kenya, Slovenia, Sri Lanka,
Ukraine, and the Arabian Peninsula. The report concludes that the granting of cit-
izenship in these places offers important material and nonmaterial benefits at both
the community and individual levels.
People of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic were rendered stateless
due to an anti-Haitian court ruling that forced them to leave the Dominican Re-
public and migrate elsewhere. Statelessness remains a serious obstacle to displaced
stateless people of Haitian descent in Anse-à-Pitres in that it restricts their social
and economic rights and prevents them from being full members of Haitian soci-
ety. In this sense, it is imperative that the Haitian state intervenes to provide legal
protection to these people conforming to the guidance of universal human rights
in order to restore their dignity and decrease their social marginalization.
The statelessness of the progeny of Haitian migrants in The Bahamas is part
of a larger system of anti-Haitianism that can be rectified through challenging and
changing legal barriers that create roadblocks to citizenship. The Bahamian state
should include people of Haitian descent born in The Bahamas as potential and
future citizens for the future of the country. This can be rectified through changes
in the sections of the Bahamian constitution that render them de facto stateless.
Overall, citizenship is a problem in granting the rights and privileges associated
with full citizenship. In both case studies, anti-Haitianism is the mechanism that
triggers statelessness in the first place. While granting full citizenship can serve as
a temporary solution, there needs to be other forms of sociality and inclusion that
can guarantee that people of Haitian descent, and other people of African descent,
can live lives of dignity and free of violence wherever they may reside.

Anti-Haitianism and Statelessness in the Caribbean 403

 Notes

1 In The Origins of Totalitarianism ([1951] 1985), Hannah Arendt discusses the phenomenon of

statelessness in a chapter titled “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.”
She describes the period between World War I and World War II as a moment when disintegration
was introduced to Europe through the tool of denationalization—when people were stripped of their
citizenship rights: “Denationalization became a powerful weapon of totalitarian politics, and the con-
stitutional inability of European nation-states to guarantee human rights to those who lost nationally
guaranteed rights, made it possible for the persecuting governments to impose their standard of values
even upon their opponents. Those whom the persecutor had singled out as the scum of the earth—Jews,
Trotskyites, etc.—actually were received as scum of the earth everywhere; those whom persecution had
called undesirable became the indésirables of Europe” (Arendt [1951] 1985, 269). Arendt uses stateless
people as an example to demonstrate how basic human rights are difficult to experience unless a person
is a citizen of some nation and describes de jure statelessness: an individual who is not considered as a
national or citizen by any state (Article 1 of the 1954 United Nations Convention relating to the Status
of Stateless Persons). A contemporary example of this form of statelessness are the Rohingya who live
in western Myanmar and were stripped of citizenship under a law in 1982 (Southwick 2015). Numerous
statelessness studies (Blitz and Lynch 2009; Cheong 2014; also see Manly and van Wass 2014) recom-
mend the need for more historically informed work and microlevel investigations of the way in which
statelessness affects people at local levels. With an emphasis on participant observation, ethnographic
methods, and microlevel study over sustained periods of time, our anthropological work addresses this
important area by focusing on statelessness among people of Haitian descent in the Caribbean, a pop-
ulation that is stigmatized throughout the Western Hemisphere since Haitian independence in 1804.
In Joseph’s case study, we see how the statelessness of denationalized Dominicans of Haitian descent
living in a Haitian border town creates serious challenges to integrate into Haitian society. In Louis’s
case study, the progeny of Haitian migrants born in the Bahamas are rendered stateless due to having a
nationality that is rendered ineffective due to the nation they live in.
2 See https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/countries-and-territo
ries/bahamas/ for updated statistics related to the spread of COVID-19.
3 Another form of statelessness has developed known as de facto statelessness, which David Weiss-

brodt and Clay Collins describe: “De facto statelessness can occur when governments withhold the usual
benefits of citizenship, such as protection, and assistance, or when persons relinquish the services, ben-
efits, and protection of their country. Put another way, persons who are de facto stateless might have
legal claim to the benefits of nationality but are not, for a variety of reasons, able to enjoy these benefits.
They are, effectively, without a nationality” (Weissbrodt and Collins 2006, 251–52).
4 The Bahamian dollar is equivalent to one US dollar.

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