page_title: Haitians in the Dominican Republic
section_title: Economic and social issues
hierarchical_section_title: Haitians in the Dominican Republic / Economic and social issues
caption_attribution_description: English: Haitian women in the streets of Calle del sol Santiago, Dominican Republic
context_page_description: Haitians in the Dominican Republic or Haitian Dominicans are residents or citizens of the Dominican Republic of Haitian descent. Since the early 20th century, Haitians have made up the largest immigrant population in the Dominican Republic.
context_section_description: Many Haitians migrate to the Dominican Republic primarily to escape the poverty in Haiti. In 2003, 80% of all Haitians were poor (54% in extreme poverty) and 47.1% were illiterate. The country of nine million people has a fast-growing population, but over two thirds of the jobs are not in formal work places. Haiti's GDP per capita was $1,300 in 2008, or less than one-sixth of that in the Dominican Republic. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Haitians have migrated to the Dominican Republic, with some estimates of 800,000 Haitians in the country, while others believe they are more than a million. Many Haitian migrants or their descendants work in low-paid and unskilled jobs in building construction, household cleaning, and in plantations.
  In 2005 Dominican President Leonel Fernández criticized that collective expulsions of Haitians were "improper and inhumane". After a delegation from the United Nations issued a preliminary report stating that it found a profound problem of racism and discrimination against people of Haitian origin, the Chancellor Dominican Carlos Morales Troncoso gave a formal statement saying "Our border with Haiti has its problems, this is our reality, and this must be understood. It’s important not to confuse national sovereignty with indifference, and not to confuse security with xenophobia"
  After the earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010, the number of Haitians doubled to 2 million, most of whom illegally crossed after the border opened for international aid. Human Rights Watch estimated that 70,000 documented Haitian immigrants and 1,930,000 undocumented immigrants were living in Dominican Republic.
  Before 2010, the Constitution of the Dominican Republic generally granted citizenship to anyone born in the country, except children of diplomats and persons "in transit". The 2010 constitution was amended to define all undocumented residents as "in transit". On September 23, 2013, the Dominican Republic Constitutional Court issued a ruling that retroactively applied this definition to 1929, the year Haiti and the Dominican Republic formalized the border. The decision stripped Dominican citizenship from about 210,000 people who were born in the Dominican Republic after 1929 but are descended from undocumented immigrants from Haiti. Many of the Dominican Republic-born do not have Haitian citizenship and have never been to Haiti; the decision rendered them at least temporarily stateless. Some Haitians began leaving voluntarily or in response to ethnic violence. The government set a deadline of June 17, 2015 for affected people to leave the Dominican Republic, as nighttime "bandits" threatened Haitians with violence and deportation; by August 2015 "hundreds" had been deported.
caption: Haitian women in calle del sol Santiago, Dominican Republic.
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