Abstract

Many of these deportees, with no place to go and who have lived in the Dominican Republic for generations, have settled along the Haitian-Dominican border in six makeshift refugee camps, thus creating the Caribbean worst modern-day refugee crisis.3 4 According to Simone Young, the numbers in camps are in the tens of thousands.5 The purpose of this study is to outline the causes and consequences of. [...] They claim these deportations have been racially motivated because they are perceived by the Dominican people as being Haitian rather than Dominican solely for having black skin.20 Due to differences in colonization patterns by the French in Haiti and the Spanish in the Dominican Republic, most of the Haitian population is descended from African 6 slaves while the majority of Dominicans highlight. [...] Amnesty International reports that a few bands of refugees have been slipping across the porous border to farm in the more agriculturally-rich land in the Dominican Republic.26 Similarly, these camps have extremely limited access to proper sanitation; the smallest of the camps has, shocking, zero latrines, and the largest has only 12 for a population of more than 2,000 people. [...] The Haitian government has been of limited use, with the bulk of the task falling on the shoulders of Haitian human rights organizations and other international NGOs.31 Where to go from here? The chaos on the ground is seemingly overwhelming with neither government stepping up to the task; the job facing international NGOs and human rights organization seems enormous. [...] The Haitian government has the power to facilitate official settlement of deported Haitian nationals, return now ex-Dominican citizens living in the refugee camps to their homes in the Dominican Republic, and increase support capacity for infrastructure in the refugee camps along the border as damage control.