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Abstract
Stateless people are noncitizens everywhere. Yet, unlike many noncitizens, they are not border crossers. Despite the majority’s physical rootedness in the countries of their birth, the stateless are nonetheless forcibly displaced. Their peculiar form of noncitizenship displaces them in situ as they lack the right to choose to belong to the specific communities within which they were born and raised. Using The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic as case studies, this article illustrates how the stateless are either forcibly cast into liminality or made to take on the nationality of a country with which they do not identify when the State can no longer tolerate their noncitizen status.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Personal interview, Nassau, November 5, 2012. All quotations attributed to Louis throughout the rest of the article are from this interview.
2. Personal interview, Nassau, November 1, 2012.
3. Personal interview, Nassau, November 1, 2012.
4. See also Forced Migration Review’s issue on ‘Crisis’ (Citation2014) and Forced Migration Online’s digital resources, especially their three-pronged understanding of forced displacement (Citation2015). A plethora of scholarship also exists on the forced movement of the internally displaced and refugees as a result of crises or conflicts.
5. See also Brubaker (Citation1989, 146 and 155).
6. Although this article is a comparative case study, the arguments made here are not unique to the cases at hand. Other liberal democracies (in noncrisis situations), such as Canada and the United Kingdom, generate stateless populations that face similar experiences of displacement in situ.
7. Freedom House, which scores States according to their practices in the areas of civil liberties and political rights, classifies all the countries in the Caribbean – with the exception of Cuba and Haiti – as ‘free’ (Citation2013). The Bahamas earns the highest freedom scores possible (1 out of 7) in both civil liberties and political rights, while the Dominican Republic scores slightly lower, earning a score of 2 (out of 7) in each category.
8. Interviews were carried out under IRB Protocol H09-130. Interviews lasted an average of 51 min. No pseudonyms are used for the interviews conducted under this protocol, which took place under the condition of anonymity. Fourteen of these interviews were held in Nassau and two were conducted via telephone.
9. Interviews were carried out under IRB Protocol H11–261, which allowed me to interview ‘Special Populations.’ Interviews lasted an average of 57 min. Only one pseudonym is used from this study – ‘Marie St. Cecile’ – because, as a formerly stateless person, she did not want her real name to be used.
10. A batey is the traditional name for a settlement where sugarcane workers resided during the heyday of the sugarcane industry in the Dominican Republic, from the 1930s to the 1980s. Today, these settlements are primarily shanty towns where many Dominicans of Haitian descent live.
11. An official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs provided the Ministry’s position via email.
12. I performed purposeful and snowball sampling for both case studies (see Belton Citation2014 for an elaboration of my methodology).
13. Additional interviews were conducted in New York City with two other program officers of OSJI – Sebastian Kohn and Indira Goris – on February 7, 2012 and February 22, 2012, respectively.
14. Also note, as a Bahamian, I have spent many hours in The Bahamas informally chatting with ‘citizens’ and ‘noncitizens’ at supermarkets, retail stores, religious venues, and their homes about Bahamian membership practices, statelessness, Haitian migrants, and discrimination.
15. See, for instance, Marcelino and Farahi (Citation2011), Menjívar (Citation2006), Hynes (Citation2011), Menjívar and Bibler Coutin (Citation2014), Riggan (Citation2011) and Torres and Wicks-Asbun (Citation2014).
16. Personal interview, Santo Domingo, July 13, 2012.
17. Personal interview, Nassau, July 29, 2009.
18. See Wooding and Moseley-Williams (Citation2004, 33–34), Martínez in IACHR (Citation2005) and Aber and Small (Citation2013, 81).
19. Kristeva’s work (Citation1980) focuses on the impurity that results from abjection in the spheres of literature, psychology, and religion.
20. Vargas was one of the presenters at the ‘Simposio sobre Derecho a la Nacionalidad’ in Santo Domingo where I also presented.
21. Personal interview, Marsh Harbour (MH), Abaco, November 12, 2012.
22. Personal interview, MH, Abaco, November 12, 2012.
23. Personal interview, MH, Abaco, November 14, 2012.
24. Personal interview, Nassau, August 4, 2009.
25. Personal interview, Nassau, October 30, 2012.
26. Personal interview, Nassau, 8 November 2012.
27. Interviews took place in El Caño on February 7, 2013.
28. Personal interview, Nassau, October 29, 2012.
29. For example, Chapter 190/Bahamas Nationality Act (Government of The Bahamas Citation1973b) and Chapter 191/Immigration Act (Government of The Bahamas Citation1967).
30. Personal interview, Nassau, July 27, 2009. The Free National Movement is one of the two major political parties in The Bahamas.
31. Such ‘gaps’ affect all children born of noncitizens, as well as children born overseas to Bahamian women married to foreigners.
32. Details of each of these processes are found in chapter 3 of ‘Precarious Belonging: Stateless People in a “Postnational” World’ (Belton Citation2014).
33. Email correspondence, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, April 15, 2013.
34. Personal interview, Nassau, July 28, 2009.
35. For example, most civil registries are located in urban settings that are often difficult to access by the largely rural population. Additionally, many civil registries were destroyed during the 2010 earthquake.
36. See chapter four of Belton (Citation2014) for an elaboration of these practices.
37. All quotes from Sentence TC/0168/13 are my own translations.
38. Whereas a person was considered ‘in transit’ if s/he were in the Dominican Republic 10 days or less (Government of the Dominican Republic Citation2013a, 118), Ley 285-04 (Government of the Dominican Republic Citation2004) reinterpreted the ‘in-transit’ clause to equate it with not being legally present in the country (Government of the Dominican Republic Citation2013a, 62–3).
39. The JCE is the Central Electoral Board. It is the body mandated with setting elections and issuing Dominican identity documents.
40. Article 2 of the CRC states that ‘States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that the child is protected against all forms of discrimination or punishment on the basis of the status, activities, expressed opinions, or beliefs of the child’s parents, legal guardians, or family members’ (UN Citation1989).