In this presidential election year, the ironies should not be lost on anyone that the three top republican presidential nominees include two candidates of Hispanic descent: Senators Marco Rubio (R. Fl.), and Ted Cruz (R. Tex) (both are of Cuban descent). Yet all three top candidates for the presidency are struggling over who is the most anti-immigrant.
Senator Rubio has an uphill climb here because he was one of the co-sponsor of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013, which included a path to legalization, and eventually citizenship, for immigrants who are currently in the United States illegally provided they met certain conditions. While he has since tried distancing himself on the matter, he also has some real trouble with consistency, or perhaps honesty. Rubio now champions himself as the most conservative candidate and touts among other things, opposition to sanctuary cities, and two weeks ago declared that on his first day in office he would end President Obama's deferred action program (DACA), which gave undocumented children a status where they could stay in the United States for a certain period of time. This last position by Rubio stated in English is in stark contrast to his previous pro-immigrant/pro-DACA statements made to journalist Jorge Ramos wherein Rubio championed the goals of President Obama's deferred action program and stated he would end it by in effect making it permanent as part of his new comprehensive immigration law. Yet during the last presidential debate, Senator Ted Cruz questioned Rubio on Rubio's position concerning DACA, and Rubio declared Obama's program was unconstitutional and would end on his first day in office. What Rubio failed to mention was that he previously said he would end DACA's temporary solution because as President, Rubio would make amnesty for undocumented children permanent. So which one is it Senator Rubio? Or were you merely pandering to both sides on the matter?
Senator Ted Cruz for his part, perhaps forgetting his immigrant roots stemming from both Cuba and Canada, is far more consistent and sadly strident on immigration than Rubio. Indeed, not only does "Ted" avoid he real name: "Rafael Edward," Cruz goes to great lengths to attack his fellow Latinos. Among other things: he moved to make it illegal to have sanctuary cities in the U.S., opposed admitting Syrian Refugees, and voted against the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013, supports E-verify, opposes amnesty, and supports a strengthening a wall on our southern border. Thus, a son of an immigrant, Ted, aka, Rafael, Cruz is perhaps proud of his consistent opposition to immigrants?
The third finalist, and presumptive republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, for his part, has a significant lead in both the delegate count and with his anti-immigrant fervor. Trump has repeated his call for reinstatement of what was officially called Operation Wetback, whereby over 1 million Mexican immigrants, legal U.S. residents and citizens were "repatriated" to Mexico. Trump's assault on the Latino community is not limited to immigrants though. He is also notorious for leading a movement known as the "birthers," which calls for doing away with over 150 year practice of recognizing birthright citizenship. Despite his alienating accusations, Birthright citizenship dates back to the very creation of democracies. Our own Constitution's recognition, in the 14th Amendment, provides that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States." This conclusion was cemented in the 1898 Supreme Court ruling United States v. Wong Kim Ark.
Why the attacks matter:
Indeed, the appeal individuals like Rubio, Cruz, and Trump can garner with anti-immigrant statements also come with real, and often tragic, consequences. As history has demonstrated time and time again, the first step in the persecution of a minority, especially an otherwise either unknown or disliked one, is to solidify that target group's status as an outsider or "other" status within a society. The Third Reich, for instance, was tragically and horrifically successful of propagating hate, and thereby making it easy for the enactment of laws targeting German Jews, among others, and eventually as we know leading to genocide. More recently, Serbian leaders used similar xenophobic nationalistic fervor, sounding eerily similar to Trump's rants over immigrants, citizen children of immigrants, Muslims, and the Chinese, to promote hate leading consequently to a transition from hate to practices aimed at persecuting the subjects of that hate -- Muslims in that scenario -- which resulted in mass murders.
History is replete with examples of the legal impact of scapegoating, including the national origin quota system and the establishment of "whiteness" as a prerequisite for naturalization, which effectively excluded Asian immigrants from the United States. Later examples included the internment of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans, regardless of their citizenship, during World War II; the refusal to accept many European Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust; and the 1950s "Operation Wetback" campaign resulting in mass deportations of people of Mexican ancestry. The Immigration Act of 1965 imposed highly restrictive limits on migration from the Western Hemisphere.
The Consequences of Scapegoating Just Off Our Shores
Scapegoating and hatemongering can incite individual acts of violence and can inspire policies threatening to immigrants and citizens alike. Trump is not only scapegoating immigrants, he is calling for an end to birthright citizenship. If his plans somehow succeed, they may jeopardize the human rights of millions, particularly members of minority communities. If this prognosis seems alarmist, we need look no further than to the current human rights crisis of our Caribbean neighbor -- The Dominican Republic.
Hundreds of Thousands of citizens of the Dominican Republic were recently denationalized and threatened with mass expulsion, and the prospect of statelessness. As a result of a 2013 ruling by the Constitutional Tribunal, the country did away with birthright citizenship by limiting Dominican nationality to individuals with one Dominican parent. Despite the language of the relevant Dominican Constitution, this decision stripped the citizenship of generations of Dominican citizens, and shockingly the court applied its decision retroactively to 1929 onward.
The vast majority of these newly undocumented former Dominican citizens are dark-skinned people of Haitian descent. In a country where the poor typically have a very difficult time obtaining birth certificates, the decision effectively singles out poor Dominican-born children whose ancestors have resided in the country for several generations.
The above decision sadly reflects a racial and immigrant tension gone too far as demonstrated by the incongruous -- but common -- expressions "la cédula es dominicana, pero tú eres haitiano" (the identity card is Dominican, but you're Haitian and "soy dominicano de pura cepa" (I am a Dominican of pure stock) reflect the conflicting and contradictory ways in which and outsider status versus the privilege of the citizen is habitually defined in the Dominican Republic. Dominicans of Haitian descent are still routinely denied their civil rights, despite the text of the country's governing constitution which up until the perverse 2013 constitutional court decision, made them citizens of the Dominican Republic.
The Reasons Behind the Disfranchisement of Haitian Dominicans
Relations between Haiti and the Dominican Republic present a mixed record of periods of peace and cordial relations, punctuated with wars and invasions in the nineteenth century, and followed by a Haitian migratory flow to the Dominican Republic in the twentieth century as the latter became the dominant economy in the island of Hispaniola. The Dominican Republic became independent from Haiti in 1844, and Haitians are often vilified in Dominican historical texts that portray them as foreign oppressors that forced Dominicans to seek their independence by military means, and later tried to reconquer them by invading Dominican soil repeatedly. In addition, the expansion of the sugar industry in the Dominican Republic in the twentieth century sparked an economically-driven flow of Haitian rural laborers to the sugar fields of the Dominican Republic, where Haitians became the cheap, reliable labor force that the industry needed. Decades of labor migration created stereotypes of Haitians as poor peons willing to work for abysmally-low wages while living in appalling conditions in bateyes on the edge of sugar plantations. Haitians are further racialized as the "other" in Dominican society by antihaitianismo ideology.
Antihaitianismo portrays Haitians as radically different from Dominicans -- culturally, racially, and in terms of their character.
As such, Haitians are the ultimate foreigners in Dominican society: racialized "others" incapable of being assimilated. This perception has historically been extended to their children too. Haitian Dominicans remain "Haitian" in the eyes of Dominican society regardless of how well they speak the language or navigate the culture. For some Dominicans, they remain Haitians because of their "Haitian blood." This popular belief flies in the face of both the text of the relevant Dominican Constitution, which specifically granted birthright citizenship, and decades of jus soli laws by which Dominican citizenship was granted to all individuals born on Dominican territory "regardless of the nationality of their parents."
In 2005, the case of two Haitian Dominican girls (Dilcia Yean and Violeta Bosico) who had been denied Dominican birth certificates. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights -- in a unanimous decision -- ruled that the Dominican government had violated the rights of the girls and hemispheric treaties regarding citizenship rights. The case made international headlines because the Dominican Republic refused to recognize the Court's decision -- even though it had previously issued birth certificates to the girls in 2001 in an attempt to settle the case.
In 2013, the Dominican Constitutional Tribunal took the issue of defining Dominican citizenship a step further in a decision regarding a Haitian Dominican woman (Juliana Deguis Pierre) who tried to get her national ID card. Even though she was born in the Dominican Republic and had a Dominican birth certificate, she was denied an ID card and the electoral authorities confiscated her birth certificate alleging she was Haitian. She took her case to court and the Constitutional Tribunal decided against her, arguing that "even though she was born in the national territory, she is the daughter of foreign nationals in transit, which strips her of the right to Dominican nationality." Moreover, the Tribunal, ruled that all children of immigrants residing illegally on Dominican territory (i.e., in transit) since 1929 were not Dominican citizens -- even if they had been issued birth certificates by the Dominican authorities.
The social context of this legal decision could not be clearer. Though the new laws and judicial decisions apply to all foreigners, it is obvious that the only "problematic" aliens in the Dominican Republic are Haitians. In the Dominican Republic, a "Haitian" remains a Haitian, regardless of how many generations have elapsed since her/his family's arrival -- they are treated as unwelcomed foreigners.
The Consequences in the Dominican
The Open Society Foundation observed the permanent creating of the "other" in the Dominican Republic has led to "Stateless persons... in a state of permanent vulnerability. Denied access to birth certificates, passports, or other identification documents, stateless persons become, in effect, "non-persons" with no claim on governments who deny their existence and refuse to protect their most basic rights. More recently, a New York Times story observed: "Dominican immigration officials showed off the new buses and "reception centers" that would be used to process those who would be expelled. In a country with a history of sporadic violence against its Haitian minority -- there are at least a few lynchings documented every year -- these reports took on an ominous cast."
Thus, words matter. As the above demonstrates, hateful rhetoric against the vulnerable can lead to the creation of public policy that has the effect of completely devaluing the target groups' rights in a society. As the age-old adage notes, hate can breed fear, and fear can breed violence. As people of good conscious, we cannot condone the propagation of hate neither in our land nor in any other land, especially when it is at our doorstep.
Co-authored by Historian Ernesto Sagás, Colorado State University