mountainannie, can you elaborate on your smoke and mirror comment?
what do you really think about this regularization program?
that it is NOT a cedula.. from what is being said, that it is not any sort of guarantee of being given a cedula, that according to what is being said by those in the know, the only advantages are that one is only exempt from deportation for a year, that one will not have to go back to the home country to start the process to get a visa for the residency, and that a criminal background check for the residency from the country of origin will not be required.
Everyone who applies is evidently being asked to have the signatures of seven Dominican neighbors, and the signatures of seven members of a church group or sporting club. Any of the options.. as in one must have either this or that, which a person assumes would be options that would be exercised by the applicants, are actually options that are being applied by the State.
The clamor that Haitians are making over not getting their passports is one indication, since under the Plan, they would not even need their passports, just a birth certificate. Haitians are taking advantage of this opportunity to actually get their passports since the Haitian state has reduced the cost... not that that matters, since evidently they have run out of passports and are taking months to deliver any.
So after this all over, after the people have applied and gone back four or five times,lost work, paid for lawyer's fees to notarize their documents, they will have to go through the ACTUAL process of getting their cedulas in one year.
In the first six months of the Plan, only 233 cards were given, out of 117000 applicants. That is less than one percent.
Juan Bolivar Diaz, who won the National Prize for Journalism last year, has been one of the vocal critics of the
Plan.
An?lisis de Juan Bol?var D?az: Regular la inmigraci?n requiere voluntad pol?tica He points out that the head of the department which is in charge of adminstering it, Jose Ricardo Taveras, is the head of a small, ultra nationalist political party, La Fuerza Nacional Progressista.
Diaz notes that for businesses to regularize a foreign worker the costs are now estimated at 34,000 pesos.
Bolivar cites public census figures which state that 36% of the more than 500,000 Haitians counted arrived here between 2010 and 2012, while a full 2/3 entered under the government of Leonel when the ultra nationalist had control of the migration policy. He calls the denunciations of the illegal migrations on the part of the government hypocritical.
Members of the agricultural sector say that 80% of the labor is done by Haitians. Bolivar cites the law that says that no more than 20% of workers in any industry be foreign.
Above all, Bolivar underscores that it is a capital offense to confuse the legalization of recent immigrants with the "denationalization" of the descendants of Haitians whose roots were planted in this country since 1929 as the Supreme Court has done. He points out that 55% of the Haitians in the census survey had Dominican birth certificates.
El Caribe ? Estudio: en RD viven 534,632 extranjeros
here is another scathing commentary from Hoy
Es culpa nuestra
I call this the "James Watts Environmental Policy" in memory of when Regan put the noted anti environmentalist in charge of the environmental protection agency.
The DR has implemented this Plan, put the implementation of it in the hands of those who are opposed to it, and at the same time, withdrawn from the InterAmerican Human Rights Court so that they will not longer be subject to any court cases there.
Because it is place, the DR can say, as it is saying, that they are giving "amnesty" to illegal Haitians, even with a success rate of less than 1%.
Those who are following closely can understand that the Dominicano Haitianos, who were denationalized by the Supreme Court decision, and might have been entitled to voting rights rather than a "no vota" foreign cedula, were given the shortest time to comply with the complicated regulations.
Conveniently, the Haitian state has acted as it always does by being either absent or corrupt and a very small percentage of those who went to get their papers from the consulats even got them.
According to Bernard Vega, who wrote in Hoy, the Dominican consulate in Haiti regularly i ssues more visas than are allowed by accord. This is particularly telling since those who qualify for a DR visa must have both passports and money and will most likely not be working in construction or agriculture.
So, from my point of view, this program was put in place as a cover to appease the international community to quell the uproar over the Supreme Court decision of stripping away the possibilty of citizenship for thousands who were born here. There is no question that the DR is sovereign and has the right to determine migration and citizenship issues.
However, what is happening now is that Dominicans are being told that this process is open and just, that all illegal Haitians have been given a fair and easy path to become legal, that the process is free, that all the hold ups are from the Haitian side, and that the Dominican State is opposed to this massive illegal immigration.
So, when large deportations resume, as they most assuredly will, and the international outcry arises, as it will, Dominicans will be completely confused and feel attacked and put upon, not understanding the finer points of exactly what the objections have been.
Because, of course, all those illegals had an ample opportunity to regularize themselves under the Plan.