摘要 : Legal Identity, Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic: From Citizen to Foreigner analyses how thousands of persons of Haitian ancestry recently found themselves needing to re-establish or establish their legal Dominican ide... 展开 Legal Identity, Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic: From Citizen to Foreigner analyses how thousands of persons of Haitian ancestry recently found themselves needing to re-establish or establish their legal Dominican identity when officials rejected their extant documents or requests to acquire the citizen-confirming papers to which they were entitled. For over 80 previous years, the constitution recognised the right of citizenship to all people born on Dominican territory. Yet many low-income Dominicans, especially those descended from Haitian migrants, never received official proof of their birth in the country. And even for those who had, the official justification for revisiting their citizenship status was that their parents had been 'in transit' or residing with irregular migratory status in the Dominican Republic at the time of their birth. As recently as the mid-2000s roughly 20 per cent of Dominicans possessed no form of documentation whatsoever. Until the twenty-first century, however, many managed to eke out a living and fly under the security radar of the state. Proof of citizenship, increasingly in the form of digital identity documentation, would be required to consolidate one's legal inclusion and gain access to education, health and social-welfare programmes, banking, telephone and other vital services. Prompted by international organisations that simultaneously supported the roll-out of social programmes and legal identity reforms to protect against fraud, a national audit conducted to regularise the citizenship rolls ended up exposing and rendering vulnerable to statelessness many native-born migrant-descendant people, even some who possessed documentation verifying their birth in the country. 收起