From Race to Risk: Framing Haitians in Dominican Policies and Discourses on Migration, 2020–2025

Abstract

Migration between Haiti and the Dominican Republic has long reflected Hispaniola’s intertwined histories of grievances, distrust, inequality, and interdependence. Under President Luis Abinader (2020–2025), this relationship gained renewed political significance as regional instability and Haiti’s institutional collapse made migration a central concern of governance. This study examines the Dominican state’s discourse on Haitian migration through a combination of historiographical interpretation and discourse-historical frame analysis. Using the diagnostic–prognostic–motivational triad, this analysis examines 26 official statements, legal documents, and media articles to trace how notions of order, security, and humanitarian responsibility have structured migration policy during this period. The findings identify four interrelated logics—securitisation, nativism, racialisation, and statelessness—that shape how migration is problematised and managed. While overtly xenophobic or racist language has largely disappeared from official discourse, older anti-Haitian hierarchies persist beneath a technocratic and humanitarian surface. Deportations, biometric border management, mass detentions, violence, and preferential bureaucratic practices are presented as neutral governance, even as they disproportionately and unlawfully affect darker-skinned citizens and migrants of Haitian descent. The analysis suggests that Dominican migration governance represents neither rupture nor continuity, but rather a rearticulation of narratives of security, sovereignty, and national identity in a context of contemporary securitising issues in Haiti.

1. Introduction

Migration flows between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (DR) have intensified over the past few decades. A series of devastating natural disasters, such as the 2010 earthquake, recurrent hurricanes, the spread of cholera, and, more recently, the assassination of President Jovenel Môise in 2021 and the advance of armed gangs, have together displaced well over 1.4 million Haitians (IOM 2025), making migration towards the Dominican Republic a matter of survival rather than choice (Basciano et al. 2016; OECD and INURED 2017; Coulange-Méroné 2018, 2019; INURED 2024; UNICEF 2024; Marcelin and Cela 2024). The Dominican Republic, sharing the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, has become a refuge for many. Today, approximately 496,000 Haitians reside in the country, accounting for around eighty to ninety per cent of the total migrant population in the DR (IOM 2023, p. 25).

True to form in the Caribbean region, migration flows are highly intraregional, as is the case with the Haitian migration to the Dominican Republic. The Haitian diaspora is mainly located in the Dominican Republic, the USA, and Canada, and Haitians comprise the largest migrant group among Caribbean nations (Lacarte et al. 2023). The magnitude of Haitian migration to the Dominican Republic has long-standing origins and has been essential to understanding both nations, one could argue, as it has created transnational connections and divisions across the Dominican Republic, from the borderlands to cities, towns, and the countryside. Kiran C. Jayaram (Jayaram 2010) reveals that migration has shifted from traditional sugar plantation labour to more diverse sectors such as tourism and construction. Coulange-Méroné (2018) argues that Haitian workers have been a consistent feature of the Dominican labour market for over a century, with migration flows never completely stopping despite challenges, and suggests that a significant portion of Haitian immigrants are now establishing longer-term residency, which distinguishes this migration from more transient Haitian migration patterns in other regions (Coulange-Méroné 2019).

In response to the large-scale migratory flows between Haiti and the DR, contemporary Dominican governments have responded to this reality with a combination of administrative control and territorial anxiety. Their discourse blends technocratic language with older nativist ideas, portraying Haitian migration as a danger to economic stability and national security (Fouron 2020; INURED 2024). This posture is not new, but under President Luis Abinader, it has gradually hardened. His administration has overseen a large-scale campaign of securitisation by employing expulsions and border militarisation, which are presented as acts of protection. The collective HaitianosRD published their report “Mass Deportations and State of Exception in the Dominican Republic” (2025), in which they document that between 2021 and April 2025, approximately 900,000 to one million people were deported to Haiti, and that the state apparatus under President Luis Abinader’s administration committed systematic human rights violations against people of Haitian origin—ultimately, linking 54 deaths to racially motivated deportations (Colectivo HaitianosRD 2025, p. 15). Most were Haitian nationals, though many were Dominicans of Haitian descent—indicating how the boundary between citizen and foreigner remains racially drawn. Between 30 May and 6 June 2023, 4603 people were expelled, and during a single week in October 2024, the number reached 10,000 (Migration.gob 2023; Le Monde 2024; Presidencia 2024b). These operations have been accompanied by widespread reports of abusive action by security forces, including family separations, arrests in hospitals, and the detention of pregnant women (Rodríguez 2023; UNICEF 2024).

President Luis Abinader’s public statements defend these practices as necessary acts of sovereignty. Decree 668-22, issued in November 2022, created a special security task force to identify and remove foreigners in the bateyes—communities long associated with Haitian labour (Rodríguez 2023). In October 2024, the National Security and Defence Council authorised the removal of up to 10,000 migrants each week (Presidencia 2024b). Deportations have increased accordingly, from 171,000 in 2022 to 276,000 in 2024, a twentyfold rise from the figure recorded in 2011 (Hasbun and Brennan 2025). In response to this development, this study seeks to examine two interrelated questions:

(1)

Which discursive frames constitute the basis for the Dominican approach to Haitian migration?

(2)

How have the discursive and political practices developed between 2020 and 2025?

The Dominican Republic constitutes a fruitful case for examining the intersection of migration governance, discourse, and identity politics in the Caribbean and Latin America. The country’s position, sharing the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, has produced a long-standing and complex migratory relationship marked by economic inequalities, natural disasters, political unrest, historical grievances, violence, and persistent racialisation. Based on migration centred discourses and policies between 2020 and 2025 we employ a combination of traditional historiography and an interpretative frame analysis (Entman 1993; Caiani and Della Porta 2011) proposing a specific typology that distinguishes between diagnostic frames, which identifies the problems, and its causes; prognostic frames, which offers solutions or political interventions; and motivational frames, that proposes justifications by appealing to ideology, values and emotions of the citizenry. By taking the historical and current context into account, it permits us to examine how the state between 2020 and 2025 articulates the notion of threat in relation to Haiti, which translates into ‘tough on migration’ policies, presented as necessary and legitimate.

This study demonstrates how mechanisms of humanitarianism, nativism, and securitisation persist within the Dominican Republic’s migratory approach to Haiti, leading to racialised policies and actions by its institutions. It contributes to scholarship on securitisation and race in the Caribbean by showing how contemporary anti-Haitianism functions as an instrument of statecraft, normalising exceptional measures and reproducing precarious non-citizenship (ACNUR 2015; Murray 2024; Joseph and Marie 2022; Estrella 2020; Petrozziello 2025). Whereas earlier research concentrated on media representation (Craemer and Martínez 2021), the focus here is on the state’s own discourse and policies during 2020–2025—a period defined by the COVID-19 pandemic, Môise’s assassination, and expanding gang violence, all of which intensified migration from Haiti to the Dominican Republic, arguably, resulting in anti-Haitian bordering under Abinader’s two terms (Estrella 2024; Hunter and Reece 2022).

Methodologically, the analysis integrates the diagnostic–prognostic–motivational triad with a corpus of 26 official statements, media material, complemented with NGO reports, read through a historiographical lens that follows how older narratives of domination are revived and moralised in the present (Entman 1993; Semetko and Valkenburg 2000; Benford and Snow 2000). These developments, to a lesser extent, are situated within the Dominican genealogy of anti-Haitianism and state violence (Derby 1994; Turits 2002, 2003). Contemporary securitisation appeals to sovereignty, culture, or humanitarianism, thus emerging not as novelties but as echoes in news forms that mimic historical discourses and actions of exclusion. In this sense, the Dominican case also reveals how securitisation, racialisation, and migration governance intertwine to produce statelessness, or what Estrella (2020) terms a condition of social death, extending debates on the longue durée of physical bordering and racialised citizenship (Hunter and Reece 2022; Duany 2006; Mallon Andrews 2018; Joseph and Marie 2022; Yri 2022; Zabala Ortiz 2023).

2. Historical Context

The key to understanding the contemporary context of Haitian migration to the Dominican Republic and the latter’s discursive and policy response to these flows between 2020 and 2025 lies in situating it within the broader historical struggle over the island’s identity. Particularly, Haiti’s occupation of Hispaniola between 1822 and 1844, and the Dominican declaration of independence, are constitutive events of symbolic rupture. A key dimension of this fracture of the island is how Dominican nationhood or Dominicanism became grounded in the language of Hispanic and Catholic heritage, portraying the Dominican Republic as a fragment of European civilisation in the Caribbean and displacing the island’s African ancestry to the other side of the border, in Haiti (Duany 2006; Howard 2007). Furthermore, the early twentieth century consolidated this distinction under new imperial conditions. The United States occupied both Haiti (1915–1934) and the Dominican Republic (1916–1924), reorganising both economies around export agriculture and initiating large-scale labour migration. U.S. sugar companies brought thousands of Haitian workers to Dominican plantations, resulting in the establishment of the bateyes—enclaves of racialised labour and dependency that became permanent features of Dominican society (Fouron 2020; INURED 2024). In effect, the roots of the contemporary migration question between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, therefore, lie in this entanglement of colonial hierarchy, racial differentiation, and economic necessity. Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship (1930–1961) transformed these structures into official ideology. Seeking to transform the nation and clearly define its characteristics, Trujillo promoted European immigration and the Dominicanisation/anti-Haitianism, culminating in the Parsley Massacre of 1937, in which some 30,000 Haitians were killed (Fouron 2020; Moya 1992).

Joaquín Balaguer—Trujillo’s protégé, a scholar and later president (1966–1978), reformulated these ideas into an enduring doctrine of identity and national defence. His writings and speeches described Haitians as a civilisational threat and defended the dictatorship’s racial policies as a necessity (Moya 1992, pp. 27–28; Núñez-Ureña 2009). As Miguel Ceara Hatton (Ceara Hatton 2013) notes, the massacre and its aftermath defined Dominican identity as the negation of the Haitian, reinforced by the demonisation of their African heritage and the exaltation of a White Hispanic self-image. (Yri 2022, p. 124) notes that Trujillo’s actions and discourse elevated Dominican ties to Spain and Europe “to biblical proportions,” and contributed to building a Eurocentric myth that collided with the country’s Afro-Dominican reality (Turits 2003, p. 145). This led to anti-Haitianism, described by Vega (1988, p. 391) as an attitude “shared by the various intellectual and common sectors of the Nation,” that penetrated state institutions and political culture alike (Yri 2022, pp. 109–10). Already, in 1932, Chancellor Max Henríquez Ureña could tell U.S. diplomats that “black blood harmed the traditions and the Hispanic culture of the Dominicans” (Vega 1988, p. 391). Balaguer’s La isla al revés (Balaguer 1983) redeveloped and framed this logic in the late twentieth century, warning that Haitian influence had a “disintegrative effect on the Dominican soul” (p. 48) and branding Haitians with degrading, negative connotations (p. 52). By the end of his rule, nativism had become embedded as a sensible underpinning framework that guided administrative actions, serving as a roadmap for governance that shaped immigration law, labour policy, and the national imagination itself.

To fully grasp how political and intellectual elites sought to consolidate Dominicanism, or a Dominican identity, it is necessary to consider how their projects drew on narratives that mythified and instrumentalised Taíno as a key construct. This emphasis on heritage positioned Indigenous and European ancestry in deliberate contrast to the African ancestry of their neighbours, forming and reinforcing the nativist foundation central to defining Dominicanism in opposition to Haiti. While recent scholarship highlights multidisciplinary evidence of Taíno cultural and biological survival (Guitar et al. 2006), national discourse has articulated a mythifying narrative that Indigenous heritage is extinct. In effect, Dominicans have lived under the enduring influence of Trujillo, Balaguer, and other intellectuals’ fetishisation of the extinction myth, racial superiority, and the constant juxtaposition with Haiti (Ricourt 2016, p. 17). This has produced a sociocultural paradox in which Taíno heritage has been symbolically celebrated since Trujillo’s rule, even as the existence of Taíno descendants has effectively been denied (Aguilar et al. 2017; Hofman and Hoogland 2012; Pesoutova 2015; Priego 1967; Mateo 2004).

From the 1980s onward, Dominican migration policy was shaped by dependency on Haitian labour, with political efforts to control migration flows and attract low-skilled workers, and, thereafter, to apply exclusionary measures towards them if necessary. In essence, migrants were indispensable to the sugar, construction, and tourism sectors but were simultaneously portrayed as a moral and cultural danger (Moya 1992, p. 20). Though Balaguer’s continuing nativist influence remained the heart of state policy, and under President Salvador Jorge Blanco (1982–1986), 172 Haitians were imprisoned in San Pedro de Macorís for refusing to hand over passports to the State Sugar Council—a reminder of how bureaucratic control replaced overt coercion (Moya 1992). This follows a historical pattern in which the Dominican government has not followed its own laws and has not worked to regularise immigrants in the country. Instead, it has used document manipulation to control migrants and force them to work in the agricultural sector, such as the sugar cane industry (Hintzen 2014, p. 224; Hintzen 2016).

When Balaguer returned to office in 1990, he issued Decree 233-91, ordering mass deportations that expelled roughly 50,000 people, including minors and Dominican-born children (Lister 2014, p. 255; Refugees International 2008). The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH 1991) documented systematic violations of due process and instances of family separation. The existence of these practices was in clear violation of Article 22.9 of the American Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits the collective expulsion of foreigners and requires the government to take precautionary measures to prevent irreparable harm (ibid.). Despite this, the State discursively continued to produce frames justifying the deportations and treatment of the Haitian-related populace due to its obligations to protect sovereignty. In effect, this illustrates how frames also generate public ambiguity by blurring and downplaying the importance of humanitarian action while recurrently emphasising securitisation as a frame for migratory policies.

The 2013 Constitutional Court ruling 168-13 reinforced and extended the exclusionary policies in the legal sphere. It retroactively revoked citizenship from anyone born to undocumented foreign parents since 1929, leaving more than 133,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent stateless, and the ruling violates approximately 15 articles of the Constitution (Lister 2014, p. 248). Arguably, the ruling’s technocratic tone masked its racial intent, presenting exclusion as the outcome of neutral law. Various member states of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) openly protested the ruling. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, holding the presidency, opted to denounce the racist and anti-Haitian measures of the Dominican Republic. This was backed up by delegates from Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, and Saint Lucia, who reiterated the discriminatory nature of the ruling and its implications for the region (Lister 2014, p. 249). The Dominican president, Danilo Medina, reiterated that his country responded to the criticism by diverting the attention of human rights and instead attacked the countries making the denouncement by stating that “We do not accept impositions from anyone, no matter if the country is small or large…” (Lister 2014, pp. 251–52). Medina went on to reframe these juridical decisions as a humanitarian regularisation effort based on documentation, declaring before the United Nations that “Help Haiti! Help them document their people.”, before going on to reiterate “both in their territory and in ours. Because documentation is the first and indispensable step to enjoying a broad set of rights. Let us not allow technical shortcomings to stand in the way of a process as hopeful, as necessary, and with so much potential (…) “(Listín Diario 2014). This particular discourse consisted of a threefold pattern of diagnostic (lack of papers), prognostic (regularisation), and motivational (advocating for humanitarian reasons) frames. However, since Haiti lacked the institutional capacity to issue the required documents, the process effectively blocked their access to fundamental rights. This left the Haitians and their descendants in a position of statelessness, waiting for the eventual outcome of being expelled, while the regularisation appeared benevolent.

The exclusionary logic of the 1980s and 1990s has been further cemented institutionally by rulings such as sentence 168-13 from 2013, which eliminated jus soli (birthright citizenship). According to Lister (2014, p. 248), the ruling contravenes approximately 15 articles of the Constitution and has retroactive effects dating back to 1929. It meant that over 133,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent retroactively lost their citizenship. An examination of this event showcases various key features of the DR approach to Haitian migration. The ruling is a specific juridical construct highlighting how statelessness is a defining characteristic of the DR, according to nativist and racialised political discourse, and is institutionalised. This process highlights the potential effectiveness of exclusionary policies and how to achieve legitimacy when framed in relation to technocratic and juridical procedures. Nonetheless, various member states of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) openly protested the ruling. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, holding the presidency, brought to the agenda, emphasising the denunciation of the racist and anti-Haitian measures of the Dominican Republic. This was backed up by delegates from Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, and Saint Lucia, who reiterated the discriminatory nature of the ruling and its implications for the region (Lister 2014, p. 249). The Dominican president, Danilo Medina, reiterated that his country responded to the criticism by diverting the attention of human rights and instead attacked the countries making the denouncement by stating that “We do not accept impositions from anyone, no matter if the country is small or large…” (Lister 2014, pp. 251–52).

Meanwhile, alongside the Dominican government’s exclusionary approach, Haiti’s own crises have intensified migration flows to the Dominican Republic (Refugees International 2008). The 2010 earthquake killed over 220,000 and displaced 1.5 million (INURED 2020). While Hurricane Matthew in 2016, the cholera epidemic, and the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in 2021, the chronic political instability and widespread violence deepened the collapse and intensified migration towards the Dominican Republic (INURED 2024; UNICEF 2024). By 2023, approximately 496,000 Haitians were living in the DR, accounting for around 80–90 per cent of its migrant population (IOM 2023, p. 25). Deportations surged to 250,000 in 2023 and 24,000 in early 2024 (INURED 2024). The Dominican government’s response to this now appeared to be centred on data management, border control, and “neutral” enforcement. Though viewed across this long arc, Dominican migration governance shows remarkable continuity. From Trujillo’s anti-Haitian projects and Balaguer’s nativist doctrine to Medina’s juridical rationalisation, the Haitian presence has been managed through shifting but connected anti-Haitian repertoires of exclusion, and its structure endures through bureaucracy and the language of efficiency. In effect, the approach towards Haitian migration in the 2010s was therefore not a break with the past, but an extension of a lineage in which anti-Haitianism, racialisation, and state control have served as enduring pillars of Dominican governance.

3. Theoretical Framework

In this study, we posit that the current discursive and political practices of the Dominican state are not to be understood as a simple reaction to circumstantial events, but also as a strategy based on a historical nativist logic, defining Dominicanism, in the eyes of the former presidents Rafael Trujillo and Joaquín Balaguer, contributing to articulate mechanisms of legal, social and political exclusion. Hence, a critical analysis of the country’s political discourse enables us to understand how language contributes to creating and legitimising representations of “otherness”—in relation to Haitian migrants and Dominicans of Haitian ancestry—by highlighting these groups as different kinds of threats to state security. To properly examine how imaginaries of subjects, identity, and legitimacy are manifested throughout discourse and policies, this framework conceptualises ‘nativism’ by reviewing various scholars (Mudde 2007, 2013; Wodak 2015; Betz 2017; Norris and Inglehart 2019; De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2020; Moffitt 2020; Olivas 2024). This permits us to comprehend how ‘the people’ or ‘nation’/’state’ are mobilised to justify forms of exclusions. Not only is this endeavour relevant to this case study and its national implications, but it also situates the Dominican–Haitian relationship in a broader regional and global migratory context. Throughout this framework, we conceptualise nativism as the nucleus of the articulation of discourse and policy that forces a group to the boundaries and expels them. Thereafter, we define the processes of racialisation, securitisation of migrants, and statelessness as strategies. Ultimately, we relate these concepts and establish a coherent framework that facilitates an understanding of how Dominican migratory policies limit and exclude access to fundamental rights, citizenship, and recognition.

3.1. The Presence of Nativism in Discourse and Policies

Generally, nativism can be understood as an exclusionary component that postulates the hegemonic privilege of the natives. It may be conditioned by a series of historical, ethnic, racial, or cultural factors, and, in policy terms, it may constitute a defensive or reactionary measure against external elements considered to pose a threat to internal cohesion (Higham 1955, p. 4). At the same time, this notion of threat may function as an articulating patron, establishing coherence among different discourses, policies, and institutional practices. The expression of this patron is not only reflected in restrictive legislative, legal, and political measures, but also in discourses that normalise exclusion. In effect, nativism structures the political narrative around a supposedly authentic, homogeneous national identity, which is perceived as authentic and in need of defence due to the threat of foreign influences (Newth 2023, p. 117). Nativism resembles populism, as both share the antagonistic logic of enemies (external and/or internal) that threaten a specific group (Mudde 2007, 2013; Wodak 2015; Moffitt 2016, 2020). Despite entanglements between concepts, the key distinction between populism and nationalism—and, by extension, nativism—lies in defining the specific sets of actors that constitute each of these concepts. De Cleen and Stavrakakis (2017, 2020) propose a relevant distinction that is incorporated here, and they explain how populism considers ‘the people’ as an underdog, in opposition along a long vertical axis to the illegitimate, powerful, and corrupt elite. Nationalism perceives members of ‘the nation’ as a specific, limited, and sovereign community related to a specific territory. Thus, it discursively produces the nation’s horizontal axis that differentiates (and not necessarily ‘opposes’) members from non-members, and the own nation from other nations (ibid., 2020, p. 4). Nativism adopts this division across horizontal lines, between ‘the natives’ and ‘the non-natives’, ‘the alien’ and ‘the non-integrated co-citizen’, into a nationalist and xenophobic politics (Mudde 2020, p. 27). It discursively produces an ‘us’ versus ‘them ‘logic that may present migration as a threat to the ‘nation’ or ‘state’ and relies fundamentally on a process of ‘othering’ by features such as culture, language, religion, ethnicity, and race. Ultimately, the choice is between favouring assimilation or stopping the threat (Newth 2023, p. 162).

Thus, geographical borders become converted into a semiotic dispositive that produces a subjective political imaginary. While categories of citizenry and foreigners are not only defined legally, but also symbolically, morally, and physically as markers of inclusion and exclusion (Olivas 2024). The production of such reality has a performative reiteration, as it establishes frames in which individuals and communities are, by default, suspect or inherently inassimilable (Krzyżanowski 2020). Hence, nativism should not be understood solely as a rhetorical strategy, but also as an all-encompassing ideological technology that structures politics and legitimates various forms of exclusion, with serious material and human consequences. In terms of the case study examined in this study, we argue that nativism is an underlying component that discursively and politically facilitates the persecution and expulsion of Haitian immigrants and the Dominicans of Haitian ascendancy.

3.2. The Process of Racialisation

A central dimension to nativism is racialisation, which may be understood as social markers that differentiate, such as skin colour, perceived origin, or linguistically essential and determinative attributes. These characteristics not only contribute to the essence of belonging to the nation but also delimit those who should be excluded from obtaining essential rights. Garner and Selod (2015) argue that racialisation constitutes a mechanism in which specific parts of the populace are differentiated, controlled, and subordinated by their supposed visual and cultural differences.

In the Caribbean context, as well as the Dominican, racialisation has materialised through a pigmentocracy historically divided, where the ethnic, values, and cultural resemblance to Europeans is associated with status, national legitimacy, and access to rights. Howard (2007) showcases how national narratives in the Dominican Republic have been constructed in opposition to the ‘Haitian’ and being of colour. In effect, this translates into an identity based on ethnicity, Catholicism, and the Iberian Peninsula that contrasts with the presumed African and Black heritage reflective of Haiti. These markers of identity have been translated into various institutional practices, which actively exclude Dominicans of Haitian ascendancy, treating them as foreigners in their own country. NGOs have extensively documented the use of racial profiling and showcased how the absence of documentation serves as an excuse to negate access to fundamental rights and services such as education, health, and ultimately limiting mobility (RFKHDR 2017; Rodríguez 2023; Amnesty International 2016, 2023, 2024b).

Racialisation also produces concrete exceptional dynamics, as Rodríguez (2023) explains, the ‘bateyes’—designated residential zones for Haitians working in the cane industry—have become areas of racial exclusion, characterised by precarious living conditions, a limited number of public services, and intensified political vigilance. It exemplifies a racialised structured territory centred upon ‘being Haitian’. Therefore, the State’s underlying logic manifests itself both physically and discursively. In the latter, racialisation becomes an underlying structure that permits the State to depict the migrants as a permanent threat to security. It therefore legitimises a regime of control, vigilance, and deportation. This means that racialisation is not to be understood as a separate phenomenon, but a central component that configures the politics and discursive practices of a nativist regime, which constantly defines and redefines the boundaries of citizenship and the nation (De Genova 2016).

3.3. Securitisation of Migrants

According to Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde (Buzan 1997), securitisation constitutes a performative act in which specific issues on the political agenda—such as migration—are discursively represented as existential threats to the national order. It is “a specific cognition of nation and ethnicity that, through a prejudicial narrative, informs discourses, policies and practices of both state and non-state actors, contributing to socially constructing migration as a security concern” (Bello 2020, p. 1329). Bello further argues that when securitisation increases, it is the language of prejudice, or rather prejudicial threat narratives, which renders migration a national security concern. These narratives, overall, justify the implementation and application of exceptional policies, often outside the usual scope of the regime, to safeguard the state or the nation.

Clearly, threat and uncertainty constitute a fruitful frame; however, it is worth noting that the depicted threat or danger does not necessarily reflect objective reality, nor does it require empirical verification by agents of power. It is constitutive of a ‘speech act’ that activates collective support for the issue (Bigo 2002; Huysmans 2006; Bourbeau 2011, pp. 30–34; Norris and Inglehart 2019). Framing something as a ‘crisis’ and discursively advocating for exceptional measures may also be understood as a rhetorical strategy designed to strengthen the leader’s authority. Hence, the reactionary implications of securitisation should be understood not only as a response to external factors but also as part of the toolkit for increasing political and institutional legitimacy domestically (Moffitt 2020).

Generally, securitisation of the migrant issue implies depicting these as vessels of health risks, as well as criminal, economic, and cultural threats (Ceyhan and Tsoukala 2002; Ibrahim 2005; d’Appollonia 2012). The circulation of these threat narratives is often intertwined with the reification of racial stereotypes that emphasise characteristics such as the colour of skin, names, language, or phenotypes. De Genova (2016) argues that the figure of the migrants and the extent of the threat they represent could be constitutive of how they may (re)configure the definition of the nation. The nation thus becomes a precondition for the construction of the “other” or the “outsider” (in this case, the Haitian migrant, perceived as a threat), rationalising why modern states are predicated on defining people along ethnic and national lines (Wimmer 2002). This possible alteration of agents of power could constitute a constitutive basis that justifies securitisation, including institutional violence, massive deportation, and the systematic negation of public rights, which occurs not only through governmental control but also through activities attributed to non-state actors (Bello 2020). Consequently, this means borders are no longer merely a geographical line, but a measure of nativist-securitising exclusion that produces classification and social control, articulating both physical and symbolic borders. Borders in this context are, however, not only territorial boundaries but also sites of violence and exclusion where citizenship, statelessness, and belonging are negotiated by migrants (Fauser 2024; Mountz et al. 2013). As such, borders are everywhere where migrant bodies are constitutive of externalisation policies (Balibar 2012; Casas-Cortes et al. 2015). Other cases with similar characteristics have occurred in both Europe, following the Syrian Crisis (Wodak 2015; Krzyżanowski 2020), and more recently in the US with Trumpism (Norris and Inglehart 2019).

3.4. Statelessness as a Strategy

A stateless person, according to international law, is someone who is not considered a national of any given state. Statelessness manifests differently. De jure or legal statelessness is the absence of any nationality, prevalent amongst unregistered children born of Haitian parents in the DR, while de facto statelessness can be produced when migrants, despite having legal nationality pre-migration, are rendered stateless because of a lack of documentation/legal migration status in countries of destination (undocumented migrants) (Bhabha 2011). Both types of statelessness are prevalent in the Dominican Haitian Context and are systematically produced to institutionally exclude Haitians. Over the last few decades, the Dominican Republic has enacted policies and laws that deny legal recognition to thousands of individuals born within its territorial boundaries. The practice reached a milestone with Sentence 168-13 by the Constitutional Tribunal, which retroactively eliminated the citizenship of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent, leaving these in juridical, social, and political limbo. The practice and extent of statelessness have been widely denounced. According to a report published by the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation for Human Rights (RFKHDR 2017), the Dominican state has applied the demarcation “foreigner in transit” to justify the massive denaturalisation of Haitian migrants. The strategy has led to a daily life marked by fear, invisibility, and systematic exclusion from education, healthcare, formal employment, and internal mobility. Childers (2023) and Rodríguez (2023) describes how the current legal and political effects have converted the Dominican Republic into a Caribbean apartheid, in which racial discrimination is institutionalised, and where the citizenry is divided into a hierarchy, with those of Haitian origins occupying the lowest position on the ladder. The road for Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent to obtain citizenship has increasingly become affected by “administrative obstructionism” since 2004, a set of practices that excludes and obstructs the rights of Dominican-born descendants of migrants (Hunter and Reece 2022). The persistence of these bureaucratic efforts may produce intergenerational statelessness, and this has primarily been carried out by Dominican street-level bureaucrats, in a process explained by Petrozziello (2025, p. 667) to contain “a Foreigner’s Book as a catch-all repository; laws that lack implementing procedures; internal memos which in practice benefit two people; and splintering the stateless into ever more sub-categories of putative migrants.”. The estimates place 90,640 individuals in an affair of statelessness, with more being born into this condition and manufactured as migrants every day” (ibid. p. 674). The extent of these policies and their effects is widely documented by Amnesty International (Lorac 2024), showcasing how statelessness affects pregnant women, minors, and other vulnerable individuals, who are detained in health centres, a clear violation of their rights—evidencing how homogenous, essentialist, and exclusionary measures shape the definition of citizenship. Furthermore, Amnesty International (2025) argues that the evidence showcases how these migratory politics and understandings of citizenship reproduce intersectional exclusion and structural violence based on skin colour, poverty, Haitian origin, and being female. Hence, statelessness is not an administrative accident, but a deliberate technique employed by the State to preserve specific [racial and cultural] aspects of the nation.

3.5. Relating the Concepts

The phenomena conceptualised in this study, nativism, racialisation, securitisation, and statelessness, should not be understood as separate or autonomous dimensions, but mutually constitutive elements that produce strategies that guide discourse and practice for approaching the dilemma of Haitian migration, creating a bureaucratic purgatory that denaturalises and leaves people stateless (Petrozziello 2025, p. 674). Nativism acts as an ideological structure that permits the articulation of racial and cultural otherness, depicting the migrants as an enemy. Particularly, this frame of the ‘other’ is not necessarily reflective of just being foreign, but also of their presumed incompatibility with the fundamental societal values (racial, cultural, economic, and moral) of the nation. We approach the case study in this study by incorporating Newth’s (2023) description of nativism as a logic of articulation that organises political discourse and institutional practices, which contain exclusionary and antagonistic ideas surrounding the foundational conflict between the ‘nation’ and the ‘other’. The discursive reproduction of this antagonism facilitates systematic securitisation. Hence, according to Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde (Buzan 1997), the securitisation of migrants implies a state of emergency and the need for exceptional policies. In the Dominican case, the antagonism is institutionalised by the approval of decrees, such as 668-22, which enabled the construction of a border wall and the deployment of military forces to protect their sovereignty. However, these measures are not merely logistic responses to the political agenda; they are also performative acts that reinforce the (Haitian) migrant as a civil danger (Krzyżanowski 2020).

Racialisation contributes to social and legal logic, primarily through a process of deepening the naturalisation of differences—Trujillo and Balaguer—between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Race, language, or familiar origin convert into visible markers of the ‘other’. This entails, as De Genova (2016) explains, that the migrant is excluded not only by being a foreigner but also by being perceived as incompatible with the nation: their bodies and presence are considered to alter dominicanism. This shapes both everyday vigilance and the legal production of statelessness, in which the State denies juridical recognition to its subjects. Ultimately, statelessness emerges as the culmination of this exclusionary regime (Arraiza et al. 2020); Petrozziello (2025), Rodríguez (2023), and Amnesty International (2024a, 2025) explain that denying citizenship to individuals born in the country is conducted based on racialised and ethnic reasoning. In effect, this means that the State produces categories of secondary-class citizens, whose access to rights depends on ethnic-national pertinence rather than on principles of juridical equality.

4. Materials and Methods

This study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining historiographical analysis with frame analysis to examine transformation in discourse and migratory policies in the Dominican Republic between 2020 and 2025. This dual design enables both a diachronic perspective, tracing institutional and rhetorical developments over five years, and a synchronic perspective, examining framing strategies within specific political moments. While the historiographical approach permits the description of continuity and change in national narratives about sovereignty and order, the frame analysis provides an analytical tool for identifying the discursive and affective mechanisms that sustain these narratives. The frame analysis follows the conceptualisation developed by Entman (1993) and Caiani and Della Porta (2011), identifying the structural functions of frames as diagnostic (problem definition), prognostic (proposed solutions), and motivational (emotional and action-oriented appeals). This analytical lens enables us to examine how political processes are influenced by nativism, securitisation, racialisation, and statelessness, and how these discourses legitimise specific policy measures.

This study draws upon insights from critical discourse analysis and the discursive-historical tradition (Fairclough 2012; Reisigl and Wodak 2015). Both emphasise the importance of context in examining discourse, but neither is employed as an operative method. They provide an analytical perspective on language as a social action, where power and meaning are produced and circulated. The historiographical approach provides a framework for interpreting how the state discursively reuses and rearticulates historical and ideological narratives about order, civilisation, and national identity (Hintzen 2016). Compared to alternative research designs, this combination of historiographical and frame analysis provides a rigorous toolkit for understanding how language configures perceptions, articulates sentiments in the political sphere, and sustains political regimes. Our selected timeframe, 2020–2025, captures both the contemporary configuration and historical evolution during Luis Abinader’s presidency, facilitating an examination of migration rhetoric and policy that combines continuity and change. The endpoint captures the first year of his second mandate, enabling an assessment of how long-standing frames are maintained, adapted, or contested in current political practice.

The empirical corpus of this study reflects both the availability of sources and the analytical objectives of this study. For the period 2020–2025, the growing digitalisation of data enabled the collection of 26 documents, including 12 official speeches and declarations, and 14 news articles from renowned media outlets that reproduce full direct citations from the governments. Hence, the corpus covers both the State’s primary communication and its secondary narration across the media, enabling a systematic compilation of how discourse and migratory politics are articulated.

The analysis of our data follows a combined deductive–inductive logic to identify and operationalise interpretive frames. Deductively, the coding scheme draws on four theoretical categories—(1) nativism, (2) securitisation, (3) racialisation, and (4) statelessness—which serve as guiding analytical lenses. A document was coded as securitised when migration and/or Haitian presence was constructed as a potential threat to the Dominican nation, sovereignty, or social order. The nativist frame was applied when national identity was defined in exclusionary or essentialist terms, contrasting Dominicans and the nation with the outsiders (Haitians). Racialisation captured instances in which phenotypical, cultural, or moral attributes were invoked to naturalise differences or infer hierarchies between Dominicans and Haitians. Finally, statelessness was often referenced discursively or in policy to deny, question, or render ambiguous the legal membership and citizenship rights of Haitian-descendant populations. At the same time, the inductive approach produces subcategories through close reading and iterative comparisons of speeches, communiques, or press declarations. These are contextualised with a curated body of reports from several NGOs, both international and local organisations, as well as secondary academic literature and media representations. This provides a contextually grounded entry point into the dominant narratives and supplies detailed evidence on policy implementation, rights violations, and the lived experiences of Haitian migrants and their descendants. It serves as both an empirical counterweight and a means of triangulating state rhetoric with civil society monitoring. Together, the breadth of sources—from official speeches and press releases to civil society documentation and academic interpretations—ensures a multi-layered understanding of how, today, Haitian migration has been constructed and functions in the Dominican Republic as a political, security, and identity issue under President Luis Abinader.

5. Analysis: The Migratory Approach Between 2020 and 2025

The Dominican Republic offers a revealing context for examining the evolution of migration discourse and policy over time. Its shared island geography with Haiti has produced a long-standing migratory relationship marked by economic asymmetries, historical tensions, and racialised narratives. This has made Haitian migration a recurring focal point in Dominican politics, and the consequent section analyses how nativism, securitisation, racialisation, and statelessness intersect in a policy–discourse regime between 2020 and 2025. Across two distinct subsections, delimited by President Luis Abinader’s two presidential periods, we analyse and discuss how these four theoretical dimensions are not treated as isolated phenomena but as interlocking mechanisms of governance and meaning-making that structure the state’s communicative and political practices.

In general, diagnostically, securitisation, nativism, and racialisation construct a moral, cultural, and political boundary between a lawful, ordered Dominican we and a chaotic, racialised Haitian other. Prognostically, securitisation and statelessness materialise through exclusionary policies, including regulated entry, border fortification, deportation, and biometric control, which are framed as acts of sovereign self-defence and bureaucratic rationality. Motivationally, these processes are moralised through appeals to sovereignty, civic duty, and protection, fusing moral legitimacy with administrative efficiency and reinforcing a sense of national virtue. To clearly operationalize the multifaceted discourse, we have formulated subcategories, as presented in Table 1 below—administrative, territorial, technocratic, and humanitarian securitisation—as this captures the these aspects in a logical, coherent and legitimate way, without being too dogmatic: from (1) administrative-securitisation, and emphasis on legality (2020), (2) territorial-securitisation, and the defence of the sovereignty of (2021–2022), and (3) the technocratic normalisation of securitisation and exclusionary policies (2023), and humanitarian-securitising justification (2024–2025). Across these shifts, nativism arguably serves as the rationale that gives coherence to the state’s evolving discourse, anchoring the diagnostic construction of difference, the prognostic logic of exclusion, and the motivational moralisation of sovereignty and order. Taken together, these processes demonstrate how Haitian migration is transformed from an administrative challenge into a moralised anti-Haitian project of national self-preservation, linking the discursive and institutional dimensions of the Dominican state’s approach.

5.1. The Migratory Approach Between 2020 and 2025

During the years 2020–2025, the Dominican Republic’s migratory policies towards Haiti have been structured around four specific frames: ‘securitisation’, ‘nativism’, ‘racialisation’, and ‘statelessness. These are a product of the State’s discourse during the two legislatures of Luis Abinader, its policies, and how civil society has understood and reacted to the consequences. A comprehensive corpus of government documents, legislation, media representations, and civil society reports enables us to examine how the DR’s actions are both a reactionary response and a result of an ideology with a coherent architecture that has been established over decades. Across the years 2020–2025, we observe that securitisation (implicit and explicit) has a more prominent role, while nativism appears to a lesser extent. However, it is difficult to examine the distribution in mere quantitative terms, as the position of nativism (Trujillo and Balaguer’s vision of the Dominican–Haitian border) in contemporary and historical terms illustrates how it constitutes a structuring function that provides moral and political legitimacy that cements support for securitising strategies and exclusion of Haitians (and their descendants) from the Dominican society.

As visualised in Table 1, the discursive evolution, in chronological terms, is characterised by diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational frames. During the first term of Luis Abinader’s mandate, official discourse portrayed migration as a problem of public order and health. As the period advances from 2022, we see a semantic expansion of the frame of securitisation based on the logic of a criminal, cultural and social ‘threat’, which contributes to legitimising an increasing application of politics of control: the increased military presence to the border, the creation of a special task force designed to track down unwanted illegals, the construction of the border wall, and further denaturalisation.

Table 1. Frames in Dominican State Discourse and Policy on Haitian Migration (2020–2025).

Year	Main Frame	Sub-Frames	Diagnostic—Prognostic—Motivational Frames	Discursive Anchor Example(s)
2020	Securitisation	Administrative; humanitarian; nativist	Irregular migration framed as a threat to sovereignty—temporary work, permit regime, and bilateral control— defence of legality and territorial security.	(Listín Diario 2020)
2021	Securitisation	Territorial; nativist; crises/crime	Haitian instability and irregulars are portrayed as risks—tightened border surveillance and intelligence—protect citizens and territorial integrity.	(Fronteras.gob 2021; MIREX 2022)
2022	Securitisation	Territorial; state-security; nativist; humanitarian	“Haiti’s crises must not become ours”—construction of border wall and rejection of joint intervention—national pride and autonomy.	(Presidencia 2022a, 2022b; Reuters 2021, 2022)
2023	Securitisation	Technocratic; territorial; nativist; humanitarian	Migration recast as an operational/public-order issue— intensified deportations and administrative filtering— discipline, efficiency, and the rule of law.	(Migration.gob 2023)
2024	Securitisation	Regional crisis; humanitarian; nativist	Haitian instability reframed as humanitarian and security emergency—expanded repatriations and alert systems—“help Haiti while we protect ourselves.”	(Presidencia 2024a, 2024b; Lorac 2024; MIREX 2024a, 2024b, 2024c)
2025	Securitisation	Moralised exclusion; counterterror	Migration equated with criminality and gang threats—“fifteen-measures” plan and anti-terror designation—moral and generational duty to defend the nation.	(Presidencia 2025a, 2025b; EFE 2025; DW 2025; TeleSur 2025; MIREX 2025)

Author’s Note: The discursive anchors are a few reference points out of the 26 in total.

Table 1. Frames in Dominican State Discourse and Policy on Haitian Migration (2020–2025).

Year	Main Frame	Sub-Frames	Diagnostic—Prognostic—Motivational Frames	Discursive Anchor Example(s)
2020	Securitisation	Administrative; humanitarian; nativist	Irregular migration framed as a threat to sovereignty—temporary work, permit regime, and bilateral control— defence of legality and territorial security.	(Listín Diario 2020)
2021	Securitisation	Territorial; nativist; crises/crime	Haitian instability and irregulars are portrayed as risks—tightened border surveillance and intelligence—protect citizens and territorial integrity.	(Fronteras.gob 2021; MIREX 2022)
2022	Securitisation	Territorial; state-security; nativist; humanitarian	“Haiti’s crises must not become ours”—construction of border wall and rejection of joint intervention—national pride and autonomy.	(Presidencia 2022a, 2022b; Reuters 2021, 2022)
2023	Securitisation	Technocratic; territorial; nativist; humanitarian	Migration recast as an operational/public-order issue— intensified deportations and administrative filtering— discipline, efficiency, and the rule of law.	(Migration.gob 2023)
2024	Securitisation	Regional crisis; humanitarian; nativist	Haitian instability reframed as humanitarian and security emergency—expanded repatriations and alert systems—“help Haiti while we protect ourselves.”	(Presidencia 2024a, 2024b; Lorac 2024; MIREX 2024a, 2024b, 2024c)
2025	Securitisation	Moralised exclusion; counterterror	Migration equated with criminality and gang threats—“fifteen-measures” plan and anti-terror designation—moral and generational duty to defend the nation.	(Presidencia 2025a, 2025b; EFE 2025; DW 2025; TeleSur 2025; MIREX 2025)

Author’s Note: The discursive anchors are a few reference points out of the 26 in total.

5.2. The First Administration, 2020–2024

Abinader’s first presidential term marked a clear turning point in the Dominican Republic’s migration discourse. As leader of the Partido Revolucionario Moderno (PRM), he presented himself as a reformer and modernist—a technocrat committed to improving the state’s efficiency and restoring “order” and “legality.” This self-presentation was crucial to generating legitimacy after years of political stagnation. During the initial months of his administration, the state employed a technocratic discourse linking migration control to state order, framing irregular migration as a risk to both sovereignty and administrative stability. In September 2020, the president declared that “Haitians who come to the Dominican Republic must do so with a work permit and later return to their country” (Listín Diario 2020). This declaration of intent signalled the beginning of a new cycle of state discourse in which irregular migration was defined as illegitimate and disorderly. The prognostic solution consisted of a system of temporary work permits and bilateral protocols, presented as necessary to maintain legality and control. The president reinforced this logic by asserting that “what we are going to do is comply with the law, the immigration law, as any country complies with it, as the United States complies with it, as any organised society complies with it” (ibid.). This position corresponds to what Table 1 identifies as administrative securitisation: migration framed as a technocratic field of management rather than as a social or humanitarian phenomenon.

Despite the context of violence and civil unrest in Haiti and the absence of explicitly xenophobic language, Abinader’s discourse in 2020 can be interpreted as containing a nativist subtext. This suggests that it aimed to construct a moral and civilisational divide between a responsible Dominican “we” and a chaotic Haitian “other.” By emphasising Haiti’s instability and the impossibility of assuming “the cost of their problems,” the discourse tended to naturalise national belonging as the defence of a native community against external disorder. This approach aligned with classical nativist and securitising reasoning (Listín Diario 2020; Mudde 2007), portraying the nation as an organic entity that must be protected from foreign liabilities. Even while adding humanitarian gestures—such as proposals for regional dialogue to support Haitian development—the administration reinforced a rationality where order equalled legitimacy and migration was perceived as a potential threat.

Following the assassination of Jovenel Moïse on 7 July 2021 and Haiti’s subsequent institutional collapse, the connection between migration and national integrity was further amplified in Dominican discourse and policy. In a speech to the Consejo Nacional de Fronteras, Abinader stated, “It is my responsibility to protect the border and the Dominican people,” and announced intensified border vigilance and expanded intelligence operations. He later clarified that Haitian students’ visas “would not be automatic,” adding that “each case will have to be checked because this is an organised society,” and emphasising his duty “to protect this country and verify that no one from the gangs enters here” (Fronteras.gob 2021; Listín Diario 2021). While these concerns reflected genuine insecurity on the Haitian side—gang violence, state collapse, and border instability—the discourse went beyond administrative precaution. It translated crisis into an increasingly moralised nativist-securitisation frame, juxtaposing the Dominican Republic as an “organised society” in contrast to Haiti’s chaos, constructing a symbolic boundary between a virtuous “we” and a dangerous “they”. The articulation of the “other” fuses national identity with moral rationality, redefining security as the preservation of civilisation itself. Such discursive aspects resonate with understanding nativism as an underpinning framework and a significant part of the discourse. A key effect of this is that it may strengthen exclusionary and securitising policies, which are presumably understood as moral acts considered beneficial to the nation.

This discursive nativist-securitising frame coincided with numerous incidents of violence, unlawful detentions, and home raids by police and migration forces throughout 2021, many of which were not prosecuted or investigated (US Embassy 2022). This persisted and gained new institutional expression on 22 February 2022, when Abinader announced the construction of a border wall, asserting that “this wall is necessary to protect our sovereignty and to guarantee internal order” (Presidencia 2022a; Reuters 2021, 2022). Here, the diagnostic frame expanded from administrative control to existential security: the border became a symbolic line between civilisation and chaos, lawfulness and lawlessness. The explicit invocation of sovereignty reflects the clearly defined aspects of securitisation—when an issue is elevated to a matter of survival that justifies exceptional measures. By associating Haitian migration with crime, gangs, and infiltration, Abinader helped institutionalise fear as a mode of governance, reinforcing a nativist logic of articulation, particularly the antagonism between the nation and its constructed “other.”, or in other words, between the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

In March 2022, Abinader declared before the National Assembly that “the Dominican Republic will not carry Haiti’s burden” (Presidencia 2022a). This moment marked a transition toward a sovereignty-oriented phase, where the securitised border became both a material instrument and a moral symbol of national identity. Yet again, contrasting the Dominican Republic as an “organised and dignified society” with Haiti’s “socio-economic collapse and permanent insecurity,” Abinader articulated a moral geography that defined national virtue through difference. The prognostic response—building the fortified wall and rejecting joint intervention—reinforced the us–them division, presenting exclusion as a patriotic duty. This narrative was strengthened by Abinader’s repeated insistence on maintaining an “organised” and “responsible” Dominican society, reinforcing a cohesive national identity centred on self-reliance, order, and a sense of superiority over Haiti’s perceived chaos. These affective contrasts delimit the island of Hispaniola, binding the Dominican community, implying that its preservation required distance from the Haitian dilemma.

Simultaneously, the emphasis on “protection,” “vigilance,” and “border shielding” revealed a process of territorial securitisation, in which Haitian migration was framed as an existential threat demanding exceptional measures. The appeal to sovereignty and the celebration of the armed forces infused this rational security posture with emotional and moral legitimacy. The wall at Dajabón was described as a patriotic act in which “our national sovereignty is non-negotiable” (Presidencia 2022a), translating nativism into the language of law and technology. This type of administrative racialisation mirrors patterns identified by Hintzen (2016) and Lister (2014, p. 224), where difference becomes codified as procedure, allowing the state to deny discrimination while reproducing it institutionally. Even when grounded in genuine concerns over Haitian instability and violence, this discourse tended to produce a racialised hierarchy of order and disorder, implicitly coding Haitians as dangerous and ungovernable. The persistence of impunity for state violence against Haitian migrants and descendants (US Embassy 2022) further indicates how nativist-securitising discourse could legitimate coercive practices. The moralisation of sovereignty and superiority thus shaped both perception and policy, reinforcing long-standing exclusionary practices and the de facto statelessness of Haitian-descended populations.

By 2023, the logic of exclusion had become increasingly technocratic and quantifiable in press declarations. A press release from the Dirección General de Migración reported that “Migration deports 4603 undocumented foreigners in the last eight days” (Migration.gob 2023), specifying that 4601 were Haitian nationals, alongside one American and one Pole. The enumeration of deportees and the bureaucratic tone—omitting ethnic markers—created an illusion of neutrality, exemplifying normalised securitisation where exceptional control measures are naturalised as administrative routine. Deportation ceased to appear political or moral; it became a metric of efficiency, transforming state performance into moral validation. Although Haitians constituted roughly 80 per cent of all migrants in the Dominican Republic (IOM 2023), the discourse of efficiency and legality remained implicitly racialised. The near-exclusive targeting of Haitians was depersonalised through bureaucratic language that referred to them simply as “foreigners,” concealing racialised exclusion under the guise of administrative impartiality.

The exclusionary administrative actions also negatively affected the National Regularisation Plan for Foreigners (PNRE), launched in 2013. Under this plan, 260,000 migrants—97 per cent Haitian—initially gained temporary residency but later lost status due to procedural hurdles and expired documentation under Abinader’s government. What began as inclusion evolved into deferred exclusion, portraying deportation as neutral enforcement of technical norms. Asylum seekers faced similar bureaucratic marginalisation: delayed or ignored protection documents effectively erased their legal existence (US Embassy 2022). In this way, the bureaucratisation of migration control reproduced racialised exclusion as routine. This intertwining of administrative, technocratic, and nativist logics became even more evident in 2023, when Abinader suspended all visa issuance to Haitians “until further notice,” citing national-security concerns amid tensions over the Massacre River canal dispute. Official data indicated that, between 2020 and 2023, more than 370,000 visas had been issued to Haitians—primarily for business and temporary labour—yet the suspension was framed as a technical measure (Listín Diario 2022). In practice, it reinforced a pattern of normalised securitisation: the bureaucratic idiom of visa policy masked a continuity of racialised exclusion, reframed as national protection. The Haitian “threat” was thus reactivated not through explicit racial rhetoric but through the administrative grammar of order and security. A few years into Abinader’s rule, this exclusionary logic extended further into detention and deportation practices. A report by the US Embassy (2022, pp. 7–9) documented widespread arbitrary arrests of persons perceived as Haitian, regardless of legal status. Migration officials detained individuals without warrants, often confiscating or destroying their identity papers and releasing them only after receiving bribes or verification from relatives. In large-scale operations such as the 2023 Ciudad Juan Bosch raids, hundreds were detained and subjected to degrading treatment, including Dominican citizens of Haitian descent. In October 2021, Migration Director Enrique García publicly declared that citizens “cannot allow them [Haitians] to take away our country,” and later argued that deporting pregnant Haitian women was permissible since “the law only prohibits their detention,” adding that he could look for them “under the beds, because the law allows it” (ibid., p. 9). These statements epitomise the convergence of nativist ideology and bureaucratic power, where legality becomes racialised and enforcement is equated with moral defence of the nation.

From 2020 to 2024, Dominican state discourse increasingly exhibited a pattern of technocratic differentiation that implicitly distinguished between acceptable and unacceptable migrants. In official declarations and interviews, Haitians were portrayed as chaotic, undocumented, criminal, and fundamentally incompatible with the Dominican nation—representations that legitimised large-scale police operations, arbitrary detentions, and mass deportations. This administrative idiom of order and legality conceals an underlying nativist and racialised logic, where darker-skinned Haitian migrants were constructed as threats to moral and social stability. In comparison, Venezuelan migrants received preferential treatment; in 2020, they accounted for 144,500 individuals, representing 23 per cent of the total migrant population in the Dominican Republic (Lacarte et al. 2023, p. 8). President Abinader repeatedly emphasised his intent to facilitate work permits for Venezuelans fleeing Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian regime—even for those with expired or non-existent documentation—while invoking a “historical debt” owed to the Venezuelan people for their past solidarity (Mercedes 2025; El Nuevo Diario 2025). This inclusive posture was further institutionalised in 2021, when approximately 43,000 Venezuelans with irregular status were granted temporary extensions and access to work or study visas under humanitarian provisions (US Embassy 2022, p. 15). Although a limited number of Haitians were granted temporary residence or humanitarian permits during this period, access to such pathways remained exceptional and inconsistent, as visa suspensions, summary deportations, and bureaucratic delays effectively neutralised most avenues to legality. Thus, while both Haiti and Venezuela experienced violence, political collapse, and displacement, lighter-skinned Venezuelans were far more readily integrated, whereas Black Haitian migrants were overwhelmingly excluded through “ordinary” enforcement.

Consequently, framing the distinction between Haitian and Venezuelan migrants in cultural or political terms overlooks the implicit class dimension it carries. Many Venezuelan migrants fleeing the authoritarian Maduro regime belonged to lower-middle or professional sectors affected by the country’s economic collapse (Freier and Parent 2019; Chaves-Gonzalez et al. 2025), whereas Haitian migrants are low-income workers with limited access to formal labour markets (Lacarte et al. 2023; INURED 2024). Arguably, this relative social capital makes Venezuelan migrants more appealing; they are represented in service and professional occupations, whereas Haitians are still concentrated in agriculture, tourism, construction, and the informal sector (Lacarte et al. 2023, p. 28; IOM 2023). This, in effect, illustrates that the migration policy in the Dominican Republic is multifaceted and mediated by perceptions of respectability, occupational class, long-standing racial hierarchies, and selective humanitarianism.

Contextualising contemporary migratory discourse and policy reveals that Balaguer’s and Trujillo’s ideological understandings of Dominicanism and notions of civilisation have led to an embedded racial hierarchy. This hierarchy has been socialised, guiding the actions of the security forces and the bureaucratic apparatus by operating as a tacit criterion of inclusion. However, no xenophobic characteristics appear explicitly in the discourse over the selected timeframe. Ultimately, the same securitising and nativist rationale that legitimates exclusion simultaneously enables selective compassion, turning humanitarianism itself into a racialised technology of governance that perpetuates historical distinctions between the “civilised” and the “chaotic”, “violent” and “criminal”. This humanitarian-securitisation frame was promoted internationally by the Dominican Republic. Addressing the UN General Assembly, the Dominican diplomat Roberto Alvárez argued that “the stability of Haiti is necessary to regional security” and advocated for international cooperation and intervention (MIREX 2022). By actively advocating for action and framing it in terms of humanitarianism and securitisation, he positioned the Dominican Republic as a neighbour responding to the crisis, but also as a key actor in defending and saving the region, particularly Haiti, from disorder.

Between 2023 and 2024, this discourse appeared to crystallise into a more consolidated nativist-humanitarian securitisation. It was seemingly structured around the frame of Haitianisation, or a nativist frame, adapted to contemporary tendencies, which portrayed Haitians and their sociopolitical characteristics as fundamentally incompatible with Dominican identity and stability. Haiti’s deepening gang violence, institutional disintegration, and humanitarian collapse thus became central justifications for exceptional domestic measures. In response, the prognostic frame during this period emphasised militarisation and technological expansion: increased troop deployments, biometric registration systems, new arms contracts with Israel, and the externalisation of border management through bilateral accords (Rodríguez 2023). These measures blurred distinctions between civil administration and defence, embedding a logic of suspicion into everyday governance. Simultaneously, structural statelessness persisted—and arguably deepened. Rooted in Constitutional Tribunal ruling 168-13 (2013), which stripped citizenship from Dominicans of Haitian descent, the government continued to deny thousands of individuals access to fundamental rights such as education, healthcare, and formal employment (Amnesty International 2024b, 2025). As one affected woman, Nertania Vernath, testified, “they left us stateless, and it is like a civil death, like stopping to exist” (Ventas 2023; Estrella 2020). In this context, statelessness appears less a bureaucratic anomaly than a recurring instrument of governance—what Petrozziello (2025) and RFKHDR (2017) describe as political control through exclusion.

Across this period, nativism and securitisation operated in conjunction, serving as reinforcing mechanisms that fostered statelessness and juridical exclusion, with record-high deportations and increasingly restricted pathways to nationality. This exclusionary logic was accompanied by recurrent signs of governance impacted by racially motivated actions, especially toward individuals of darker skin colour. Relatively frequently, state discourse framed migration control as a patriotic duty to defend the nation, echoing the notion of dominicanism rooted in Trujillo- and Balaguer-era frameworks. At the same time, the aforementioned examples showcase the targeting of those perceived to be Haitian. In essence, Dominican identity and culture were presented as derived from their Taíno ancestry and white-Hispanic colonisers and thus implicitly contrasted with Haiti’s Black heritage (Estrella 2020, 2024; Minority Rights 2025). This conception arguably reflects what Turits (2003, p. 144) calls a longstanding mode of racism, in particular the strong emphasis on cultural practices associated with Europe and negative notions around those associated with Africa. Alternatively, “barbarous rituals inherited by the Haitians from their African ancestors” (Paulino 2006, p. 135), while Balaguer’s writings rested on the idea of inherent racial incompatibility, linking Dominican nationhood directly to race (San Miguel 2005; Marsteintredet and Yri 2008). Even when acknowledging economic dependence on Haitian labour in the sugar cane industry, he argued that Haitians represented an invasion of the Dominican nation’s European orientation, leading to a migration policy focused on denationalisation (San Miguel 2005).

5.3. The Second Administration, 2024–Present

Luis Abinader secured a decisive victory in the 19 May 2024 general elections, beginning his second presidential mandate amid a deepening humanitarian and political crisis in Haiti. The further collapse of Haitian institutions and rising cross-border insecurity shaped the campaign’s focus on migration and national defence. Within this climate, Abinader’s Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM) and its allies secured a landslide majority—146 of the 190 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 24 of the 32 in the Senate—while former president Leonel Fernández’s People’s Force (FP) lagged far behind with 24 and 3 seats, respectively. The elections reaffirmed Abinader’s technocratic image and his agenda of modernisation, reform, and anti-corruption, but also consolidated a securitised narrative that justified closing the border and Dominican airspace in the name of sovereignty, binding domestic stability to the Haitian crisis (IPU 2024).

This massive result, particularly the significant share of votes obtained, provided a stable mandate to govern amid regional turbulence and to shape a ‘tough-on-‘ policy explicitly designed to address Haiti’s crises. The absence of authority and non-working institutions, the domination of armed gangs, and the surge in violent crime transformed Haiti and, also notably, the borderlands between the Dominican Republic and Haiti into a space of acute insecurity. Kidnappings, cross-border trafficking, and the diffusion of gang networks nurtured the perception that Haitian disorder posed a direct threat to Dominican sovereignty. In this context, the Dominican state began to frame itself as one of the Caribbean’s last bastions, dedicated to ensuring order and security. Migration policy was thus redefined as both a security imperative and a moral duty transcending partisan divisions—a collective call to safeguard national dignity and stability. This public discourse transformed urgency and fear into emotional patriotism, fusing nativist exclusion with humanitarian securitisation.

Throughout 2024, the president expanded both the discourse and the institutional measures underpinning nativist and territorial securitisation. By actively campaigning for juridical exclusion, Abinader reinforced a narrative of defensive modernity. In March 2024, he insisted on the need to maintain and strengthen the border wall to ensure territorial security, thereby fortifying the symbolic and material divide between the two nations. He simultaneously announced a package of fifteen policy measures to “confront illegal migration and guarantee national sovereignty against the Haitian crisis” (BBC 2024; Presidencia 2025a). The measures included the expansion of the wall, the broad deployment of biometric identification systems, the creation of specialised task forces for urban detentions, and summary deportations without judicial review. These policies reflect three principal frames of the Dominican government’s response: humanitarian, territorial, and nativist securitisation. While the first two were publicly emphasised, the last—the logic of nativist exception—remained the operative rationale behind mass deportations and discretionary enforcement. Abinader defended this approach forcefully:

“Haiti needs to stop blaming its problems on other countries and confront its own. What we have done is ask for international attention. There are no security problems [in Haiti]? Is it an invention? They need to drop the tradition of blaming other countries. I respond to the Dominican Republic, and we are going to continue taking appropriate measures in the face of insecurity in that country (…)”.

(EFE 2025)

He later dismissed accusations from Amnesty International of xenophobia over the last few years as “absurd,” asserting that “eighty-five per cent of Dominicans are mestizo,” a rhetorical strategy that displaces accusations of xenophobia through demographic argument (EFE 2025; Swiss Info 2025a; Vásquez 2025). Standing alone, this excerpt showcases a post-racial self-description—where diversity is invoked to deny racialisation—marks a continuity with earlier discourses that equated mixture as a part of national identity, while reframing human-rights advocacy as an attack on sovereignty, actions reminiscent of Danilo Medinas dismissal of the CARICOMs critique related to sentence 168-13 in 2013 (authors note: see the background chapter for an expansion of this). Nevertheless, taking into account the historical importance of mestizaje, and particularly the Taíno heritage, it still invokes a nativist sentiment that relates to the racial differences between the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

In June 2025, the government elevated Haitian gangs to the category of “terrorist organisations” (DW 2025). By situating Haitian criminality within a global counter-terrorism frame, the state normalised exceptional measures of control and reframed border enforcement as an even greater existential act. Abinader simultaneously deployed an affective and motivational rhetoric: “Our compromise should be with a nation that has justice in its shield, unity as its fortitude, and dignity as its destiny” (Presidencia 2025b). This motivational frame mobilised patriotism through notions of unity and dignity, transforming civic loyalty into moral capital. Citizenship became an ethical test of obedience, with supporting securitisation considered an act of virtue. In effect, these societal values and characteristics define belonging and gain impact through the affective emphasis on the border as a civilisational frontier. This affects not only the nearby areas and communities but the whole nation. As Yri (2022, p. 111) argues, the border was historically conceived as a defensive barrier against Haitian culture, language, and race; its modern rearticulation as a “protective wall” continues to anchor the Dominican political imagination. Although Abinader’s modernisation narrative repackages this heritage through law, data, and technology, it presents old hierarchies in the idiom and policies of sovereignty and progress. By late 2024, official communications emphasised quantifiable control: “The Dominican Republic prioritises security in response to the crisis in Haiti” (Presidencia 2024a). At the year’s end, the National Security and Defence Council announced its goal to “repatriate up to 10,000 migrants per week” (Presidencia 2024b). The administrative precision of numbers, procedures, and deadlines served as moral justification, and this approach normalises securitisation: control that appears as routine governance. Although this language of efficiency conceals an implicit nativist structure, in which difference is translated into action, it remains largely unspoken.

A fundamental dilemma thus defines Dominican migration policy in this period. While the state frames its actions as consistent with law and humanitarian principles, policies are securitised due to the deterioration of the Haitian state and the widespread violence. Arguably, its recurring discursive emphasis on the difference between Haiti and the Dominican Republic implicitly invokes nativism and the threat the former represents. This, combined with the institutions’ exclusionary policies and actions, contradicts these claims. As García-Peña (2016, p. 204) and Yri (2022, p. 113) observe, the term “Haitian” is routinely applied to Dominicans of Haitian descent, immigrants, and seasonal workers alike, thereby blurring legal categories and sustaining a culturally based system of exclusion. At the same time, as previously cited, the U.S. Embassy had already documented arbitrary arrests of Haitians in its 2022 human-rights report, and similar patterns continued through 2024–2025. Amnesty International (2023, 2024a), Haitian Studies (2024) and Minority Rights (2025) describe widespread detentions of individuals “perceived to be Haitian,” regardless of citizenship status. One notorious case involved the deportation of 900 minors to Haiti without public notification (TeleSur 2025a), or the expulsion of 900 pregnant women of Haitian origin (Swiss Info 2025b), and another, the repatriation of 34,000 Haitians in May 2025 (TeleSur 2025b). These examples illustrate the absence of human rights that Haitians face in the Dominican Republic, and particularly grave is the fact that repatriation is conducted with a disregard for the uncertainty, trauma, and violence that they may face when they reach Haiti.

Undoubtedly, the exclusionary actions of Dominican state institutions and the treatment of Haitians residing in the country also demonstrate what Jørgensen and Phillips (1999, p. 29) call the mutual constitution of discourse and reality: policy does not merely reflect ideas—it produces them. Defining the contemporary ceiling for what is acceptable in terms of migration policy and discourse, the Constitutional Court ruling 168-13, which retroactively stripped citizenship from thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent, remains an enduring example of how discourse becomes law (García-Peña 2016, p. 206; Yri 2022, pp. 123–28). Still today, the State remains adamant that undocumented individuals cannot be recognised as citizens (Presidencia 2025a). Such policies create a subgroup of “almost-citizens” who are subjected to permanent administrative control without clear pathways to integration. Abaunza (2015) characterises this as structural statelessness, a form of governance that transforms exclusion into routine sovereign practice. International organisations warn of a new generation of children born on Dominican soil who are “legally invisible,” lacking identity documents and fundamental rights such as education, healthcare, and formal employment (CIDH 2023; Fuentes 2024; Amnesty International 2025). This exclusion also extends to the realm of public health: the government’s refusal to vaccinate the children of undocumented Haitian mothers (Acento 2025) illustrates how citizenship status has become a precondition for access to care.

In this second presidential period, though, we argue that understanding nativism as a continuous underlying logic must be approached with care. The dominant vocabulary of “order,” “responsibility,” and “sovereignty” may signal a nativist rationality, yet other forces—gang violence, cross-border crime, administrative limitations, and populist pressure—also shape policy. Nativism should not be read as an all-encompassing ideology, but rather as an articulatory, historically socialised underpinning logic that binds territorial, technocratic, and humanitarian frames into a single moral synthesis. In the Dominican–Haitian context, these hybrid discourses serve as keys to legitimation, making securitisation and selective humanitarianism plausible and juridical differentiation acceptable. Nativism thus operates less as an ideology than as an affective structure and moral grammar, the emotional architecture that renders the differentiation between the Dominican Republic and Haiti both coherent and resonant.

Within this logic, the state’s response to the Haitian crisis can be understood as a reaction to external instability and its potential impact on internal identity formation. The recurring use of borders as the nation’s limit suggests that Abinader’s second term transformed migration management into a framework of the constitutive components of citizenship. The citizenry, particularly the security forces, was called to obey not only out of loyalty but also out of a moral obligation to protect the nation as an ethical project. In this sense, the period from 2024 to 2025 marks the consolidation of a rationality in which humanitarian and territorial securitisation dominate the governance of migration, while nativism operates as its affective and symbolic foundation. In our view, this does not imply that all state decisions are driven by nativism, but rather that nativist codes, together with managerial and security rationalities, arguably form part of a coherent framework that legitimises difference and sustains exclusionary policies and structural statelessness. In contrast to the first period (2020–2023), characterised by the technocratic normalisation of control, the second period shifts the focus of control to a stronger emphasis on identity politics. The Dominican state no longer merely responds to Haiti’s collapse—it constitutes itself through the contrast with it. Thus, the dominant discursive frames of 2024–2025 combine nativism and securitisation to produce a political imaginary in which defending the border not only protects the nation but defines what the nation is.

6. Conclusions

For a long time, the Dominican political elite has propagated a particular imaginary based on securitisation discourse and policies. These have been significantly impacted over decades by Trujillo and Balaguer’s longstanding influence, as well as by post-colonial events, culminating in prejudices and notions of anti-Haitianism. In this historical context, this study explores two central questions: which discursive frames underpin the Dominican state’s approach to Haitian migration, and how these frames and related practices have evolved between 2020 and 2025. The analysis shows that Dominican migration policy in this period has partially been shaped by four closely connected logics: securitisation, nativism, racialisation, and statelessness. These frames reinforce one another, providing the state with a moral and bureaucratic vocabulary for understanding migration, legality, and nationhood. Together, they arguably create a system in which control and exclusion are presented as legitimate and rational acts of national protection.

Responding to the first question, nativism arguably functions to a certain extent as the interpretive core of this framework. In the contemporary context, it offers a moral discourse for distinguishing between a lawful and ordered Dominican community and a disorderly, criminal, chaotic, and unstable Haitian other. Around this distinction, securitisation translates difference into a rationale of defence and survival, while racialisation lends visibility to hierarchy. Statelessness, in turn, embeds this hierarchy in administrative procedure, transforming exclusion into routine governance. For the second question, the years 2020 to 2025 reveal a process of gradual transformation rather than an abrupt change. During the administrations, migration was broadly discussed in terms of legality, order, and efficiency. Policy measures, such as temporary work permits and stricter border procedures, were framed as neutral governance but relied on inherited moral contrasts, using specific words and phrases that reinforce notions of otherness from the Trujillo and Balaguer periods. The tone was technocratic, yet the subtext was one of cultural responsibility: an organised Dominican society safeguarding itself from external disorder and threat. Whereas, in the second administration, these patterns deepened and acquired a more overtly moral dimension. Securitisation was increasingly tied to patriotism and civic virtue, and border defence was portrayed as both a practical necessity and an ethical obligation. The classification of Haitian gangs as terrorist organisations, the recurrent language of unity and dignity, and the celebration of the border wall all signalled how administrative management was re-cast as a moral duty. This shift does not necessarily suggest deliberate ideological design, but rather the convergence of historical narratives, political calculation, and bureaucratic actions.

Throughout 2020 and 2025, overtly racist or xenophobic language is nearly non-existent, apart from one prominent official from the “Dirección General de Migración”, and instead replaced by a vocabulary of legality, humanitarian concern, and efficiency. Meaning that the discourse, in general, does not resemble that of Balaguer, nor Trujillo, towards Haitians. However, the change in form and tone did not alter the underlying structure; it remained the same as it was 45 years ago under Balaguer’s influence: it constructs Dominican identity in opposition to the other, and racialised hierarchies continued to shape access to protection and inclusion. So, in that regard, it partially mimics the hemispheric definition of anti-Haitianism, which asserts that it consists of ideologies, outcomes, policies, political strategies, and practices that strengthen the negative implications of race and Haitian nationality (Marcelin and Cela 2024, p. 286; Joseph and Marie 2022, p. 388). The selective humanitarianism between the treatment of Haitian and Venezuelan migrants exemplifies an anti-Haitian practice and outcome of policy, suggesting that proximity in race, class, and culture, rather than vulnerability, determines eligibility for citizenship. Taken together, the developments between 2020 and 2025 indicate a migration regime that has evolved from pragmatic, technocratic border management towards a nativist framework of national self-preservation. Administrative and legal practices are imbued with acquired symbolic meaning, with efficiency and compassion serving as proofs of civic virtue. In this process, the image of the Haitian migrant remains central, serving as a mirror through which the Dominican state defines its own order, modernity, and coherence.

At the same time, we argue that approaching this case requires caution. The examination of the 26 discourses does not reveal the pervasive nativist hostility that is prevalent in them. The reality is that the government responds to real pressures arising from Haiti’s institutional collapse, cross-border insecurity, and domestic expectations. The balance between pragmatic necessity and inherited hierarchy gives Dominican migration politics its complexity and ambiguity. What emerges is not a closed and rigid system, but an evolving, intertwined relation between past and present, between colonial legacies and administrative rationality, between fear and responsibility, between security and morality. Yet, the symbolic role of migration as a means of defining national boundaries remains constant, and this involves constructing an identity that perpetuates the border between the DR and Haiti.

In effect, future research could usefully examine how the frames presented in this study circulate beyond formal politics, through media representation, diplomatic exchanges, and daily life in the borderlands. Or directly conduct a comparative analysis between the Dominican discourse and policies of other Latin American nations that impacted Haitian migration. These suggested approaches may clarify whether the current fusion of humanitarianism, securitisation, and nativism is a temporary reaction to crisis or part of a deeper, structural pattern within Dominican political culture or in a broader regional lineage of anti-Haitianism.