In an interview in today’s Diario Libre, Monday 28 October, Jurist Juan Manuel Rosario, who was an advisor to the Congress for the preparation of Law 285-04 on Immigration, clarifies several misconceptions that have been circulating in the media on Ruling 168-13 of the Constitutional Court that confirms that people born in the Dominican Republic to foreigners without legal status do not automatically acquire Dominican nationality.
Rosario clarifies that the ruling that calls for a review of the status of individuals back to 1929 is not retroactive. He says that, “no one is being denationalized, because you can only speak of denationalization when you are taking something that the person already had”.
In the interview he comments that there are sectors that would like the border to be wide open and that have the firm conviction that the problems in Haiti will be resolved by creating a single state, where the two cultures co-exist in one state. In his opinion “that is an erroneous idea that can create, if there are pressures, one of the worst crises in the Americas. To impose a solution of this kind on nine million Dominicans is to bring about anarchy unprecedented in the Caribbean that could be very costly to those sectors that without any historical-social sensitivity have stimulated something that is absurd.
He said that the National Statistics Office (ONE) survey on immigrants shows that there are 458,000 Haitians in the country, and that incredibly, more than 300,000 have entered from 2005 to 2012. “Even though that is a conservative number for some, it is extraordinary for a country,” he says. He added that Brazil, a large nation, chose to receive only 2,500 Haitians before it began to take drastic measures on its borders to prevent the influx into its territory. “Nevertheless, we with a small territory and an economy incapable of absorbing so many people have received more than 300,000 from the neighboring country in the last seven years.”
He said the Dominican Republic has to prepare for a major diplomatic battle to defend its rights as a sovereign state. He called for diplomats who are prepared to defend the interest of the Dominican state. “Sometimes we have diplomats who do not know who they represent, whether it is the Dominican Republic, or the state where their post is located,'” he said.
www.diariolibre.com/noticias/2013/10/28/i408603_hay-sectores-que-quieren-una-polatica-frontera-abierta.html
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