Immigration, State and Neoliberalism. Practices of irregularization and denationalization in the Caribbean


Amin Perez, Université du Québec à Montréal

The history of nation-states includes a series of attempts to deprive migrants of their regular residency status and their children of citizenship rights. In 2013, on the Caribbean Island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic (D.R.), the D.R. Constitutional Court ordered the revocation of citizenship for men, women, and children born to at least one Haitian parent between 1929 and 2007. This unprecedented retroactive repeal, far from being the result of a spontaneous decision, is part of a long history of controlling the legal status of Haitian workers on Dominican sugar cane plantations. In order to account for this making up of “illegality,” this presentation proposes to historicize the modes of control and domination of Haitian migration to the D.R. since the beginning of the twentieth century. The main objective of this presentation is to reconstruct the mechanisms and reasons that led the Dominican state to make origin unequal. Drawing on extensive research into institutional archives and interviews, this paper seeks: First, to present the readjustments of State domination to immigration. The production of illegality became “necessary” because the effects of Haitian immigration, which disrupted the temporary nature of the migration assigned to them, blurred the separation between nationals and illegitimate immigrants, disrupted the control of the workforce, and disturbed the “apolitical” framework set to them. Second, this presentation shows how the processes of deprivation of immigrant’s legal status, and the citizenship of their descendants correspond to the logic of a neoliberal state. In other words, the production and racialization of “illegality” is adjusted to an economic strategy of labor flexibility carried out by mutual agreement between the State and the oligopolies. Deprived of their identity documents, they find themselves dispossessed of all legal protection and subject to the neoliberal market’s arbitrary laws. The study of these practices of irregularization and denationalization would thus offer an original analysis of the roots of a punitive political turn that revoked and denied civil rights in order to re-establish racial hierarchies and create new, precarious social categories.

This paper will be presented at the following session: