Presidency Minister Gustavo Montalvo is heading the Dominican delegation to the talks with their Haitian counterparts in Ouanaminthe today, Tuesday, 7 January. The Haitian town of Ouanaminthe (Juana Mendez) is a short distance from the northwestern border town of Dajabon.
In an official statement, Montalvo declared that the Dominican government seeks “a relationship built on trust so as to work together for the welfare of both peoples.” He said he trusted that dialogue was the best way to find understanding between the DR and Haiti. He said that the topics to be covered are immigration, trade, environment, security and natural disasters.
In a recent editorial, Diario Libre executive editor Adriano Miguel Tejada described the Governmental Commission for the Bi-National Dialogue meeting as the Dominican Republic being taken to a “sacrificial altar”. The Haitian government has been engaged in a mass media campaign for Dominican citizenship to Haitian immigrants. The Dominican government wants Haiti to cooperate by starting the paper trail by documenting its citizens in Haiti. For decades, most people who have migrated have done so without any paperwork whatsoever. The Haitian government insists on Dominican citizenship for anyone who can claim having been born in the Dominican Republic prior to the 2010 Constitution. Birth tourism to the Dominican Republic is big business, with organized tours and buses dropping off impoverished women at public hospitals.
Haiti Libre reports that the Haitian government will be represented by Prime Minister, Laurent Lamothe, Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Richard Casimir, Commerce Minister Wilson Laleau, Interior Minister David Bazile and economist Nesmy Manigat.
The Dominican Commission, chaired by Gustavo Montalvo, Minister of the Presidency is composed of: Minister of Interior and Police Jose Ramon Fadul, Minister of Trade and Industry Jose del Castillo, Acting Minister of Foreign Relations Jose Manuel Trullols and legal advisor to the President Cesar Pina Toribio.
United Nations and the European Union representatives have been invited to the meeting. Other observers include representatives of the government of Venezuela and English-speaking Caribbean organization (Caricom), which have been vocal in their support for positions expressed by the government of Haiti.
Haiti Libre reports that the mandate of the Bilateral Commission is to find a consensus and acceptable solutions to matters of migration, trade, border security and bi-national markets. As reported in Haiti Libre, “Haitian and Dominican authorities have made a firm commitment to amicably resolve the various problems between the two countries”.
As reported, the first of a series of meetings planned will serve essentially to define the working agenda of future meetings. The second meeting will be held in the Dominican Republic.
After years of a laissez-faire approach by the Dominican government, the new Constitutional Court issued the lengthy Constitutional Court Ruling 168-13 upholding the common interpretation of “in transit” as non-legal immigrant that mainly affects immigrants from Haiti who have entered the DR without legal papers. This was confirmed in 2005 by a Supreme Court ruling. The government says that around 14,000 people of Haitian origin have been found to have been issued Dominican nationality irregularly and has proposed a path to correct this with the National Legalization Plan. People who have lived in the DR without papers for years need to go through the residency process and then apply for citizenship.
The plan also seeks to end the situation in which an underclass of people lives in the Dominican Republic without legal documentation, causing major bureaucratic and social problems. The Dominican government has benefitted illegal immigrants with social benefits such as free education and health services for many years, but it now seeks to legalize hundreds of thousands of people who have not secured their legal documents.
The Medina government has launched large-scale poverty reduction initiatives including the National Literacy Plan that seeks to teach more than 800,000 impoverished people to read and write in two years, the 4% of GDP for education, and the Immigration Legalization plan, a large-scale initiative to document all people living in the Dominican Republic with residency permits or citizenship papers.
http://presidencia.gob.do/comunicados/gustavo-montalvo-“dialogo-rd-hait%C3%AD-permitira-construir-relacion-de-confianza”