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CHAPTER 1

Displaced in Place

Something much more fundamental than freedom and justice … is at stake when belonging to the community into which one is born is no longer a matter of course and not belonging no longer a matter of choice.

—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

The sun is shining warmly as the ocean breeze gently moves among the pine trees. We have been sitting here a while, our only company a lone crab scavenging for food at the water’s edge. “She had just graduated out of high school,” says Luzena Dumercy, looking out to sea. “She graduated that Friday and that Sunday she left on the boat.”¹ The young woman to whom Dumercy refers never came back. She was one of at least eleven people who drowned in Bahamian waters on June 11, 2012, attempting to make it somewhere else.² “You have to understand why we get to that point to begin with,” continues Dumercy. “They don’t want us here. They don’t make us feel like we belong.… Why would you stay somewhere you’re not wanted?”

Although we are discussing why some people of Haitian descent undertake the perilous sea voyage to leave their Bahamian home, Dumercy’s story is a local echo of a global phenomenon—the widespread movement of people from one place to another in the contemporary era. According to the United Nations (UN), over two hundred million people are on the move globally (UN DESA 2016, 1 and 5). Of these, more than nineteen million are refugees (1 and 9). Whether people are fleeing conflict or persecution, seeking better economic opportunities, or attempting to reunite with family members, the recent images of bodies washing up on Mediterranean shores, of people scaling seemingly impenetrable fences in places like Ceuta and Melilla, and of individuals running across weakly managed borders, add flesh, if not individual stories, to these statistics. What distinguishes the people in Dumercy’s account from many other migrants, however, is that they are driven to leave their home not because of conflict, crisis, or persecution, or because they are trying to escape from an autocratic, failing, or failed state. Instead, they are trying, in Dumercy’s words, “to flee” because they feel as if they do not belong. “They want to leave this place because it’s toxic sometimes,” Dumercy explains. “You shouldn’t be stateless in the place [where] you were born and where you feel like you’re not included or not wanted.”

This book examines the situation of those who are excluded from formal belonging by practices of citizenship deprivation and denial in the countries of their birth. Unlike the majority of forced migrants and other people on the move, these individuals are not recognized as nationals³ by any state under the operation of its law (UN 1954). They are stateless. Statelessness affects more than ten million people worldwide (UNHCR 2015e).⁴ Without any formal bond of citizenship, stateless people are susceptible to an array of human rights violations, social exclusion, and pervasive insecurity, among other concerns.

While their plight can be just as troubling as that suffered by refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and other forced migrants, stateless people are rarely forced to flee their homes, whether within a state as IDPs or across state borders as refugees.⁵ They are consequently not considered forcibly displaced persons. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the body mandated with the protection of refugees and stateless people globally, for instance, remarks that a “staggering crisis” faces the world as nearly sixty million people are forcibly displaced (Murray 2015, n. pag.); but it does not include the stateless within this figure because “being stateless doesn’t necessarily correlate to being displaced” (UNHCR 2014f). In this book, I challenge this position.

Whereas Hannah Arendt, one of the twentieth century’s great political theorists, lamented that the stateless were referred to as “‘displaced persons’ … for the express purpose of liquidating statelessness once and for all by ignoring its existence” (Arendt [1948] 2004, 355), I contend that we must reconceptualize statelessness as a form of forced displacement precisely to understand and address this extreme form of noncitizenship. By reconceptualizing statelessness as a form of forced displacement in situ—that is, one does not have to be physically pushed across borders or made to flee one’s home within a state due to conflict, crisis, or persecution to be forcibly displaced—I demonstrate how states can engage in practices that forcibly displace the unwanted among them, often through seemingly neutral membership policies and laws or ostensibly banal bureaucratic procedures.

Using a comparative case study of The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic (DR), I show how the stateless are either forced into liminality—a realm of formal nonbelonging everywhere—or made to take on the nationality of a country with which they do not identify (Haiti) when the state of their birth can no longer tolerate their ambiguous status. In both instances, I illustrate how the stateless are simultaneously rooted and displaced. They are rooted in that they are born and continue to reside within the country of their birth (although the latter excludes them); yet they are displaced in that they face similar constraints on their ability to be self-determining agents and to enjoy human rights, freedoms, and protections akin to other forced migrants. In fact, their lack of movement is one of the primary differences between them and the “rightless” of whom Hannah Arendt wrote last century.⁶

Citizenship, the State, and Human Rights

Writing in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Arendt described how millions of people were essentially rendered nonhuman through denationalization procedures and forced migratory movement. These people, who had once belonged to the community of nations as citizens of some state, were now stateless, “the scum of the earth” (Arendt [1948] 2004, 341). They “lived outside the pale of the law” (353) and were homeless, unprotected beings that no state was willing to adopt. Human rights, which were supposed to apply to all persons regardless of national origin or other status, had ceased to exist for them because “it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them” (370).

The stateless epitomized the hollowness of human rights discourse for Arendt. When a man “is nothing but a man,” she argued, he loses “the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man” (Arendt [1948] 2004, 381). Arendt, herself a stateless person for many years, consequently argued that the great “calamity” to befall the stateless “is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion … but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever” (375). She therefore proposed that human rights be “redefined as a right to the human condition itself, which depends upon belonging to some human community” (631; italics added).

Since Arendt’s time, the “right to have rights” has been interpreted in many different ways.⁷ The first and most common usage is that of the right to formal citizenship in a state or the right to a nationality.⁸ In other cases the nonformal aspect of political belonging, such as “the right of political inclusion” (Michelman 1996, 205) or “the right to politics” (Schaap 2011, 33), is considered. Others define it as the right to personhood, whether this is “the right … to be a legal person, entitled to certain inalienable rights, regardless of the status of their political membership” (Benhabib 2004b, 3) or “the right to human personhood—recognition as a moral equal” (Somers 2008, 25). Yet despite the various understandings of the “right to have rights,” no right to belong, at least as Arendt understood it, exists.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) perhaps comes closest to a right to belong when it asserts that each person has a right to a nationality (UN 1948, Article 15),⁹ that is, to belong formally as a member to a state. But the UDHR nowhere describes how this right is to be enacted. Even its hard law offspring¹⁰ are silent when discussing how to translate the right to a nationality “into a specific, actionable duty on the part of any particular state” (Goldston 2006, 339). As Paul Weis writes, “There are no rules of international law which impose a duty on States to confer their nationality on certain individuals at birth” (1956, 242). The right to a nationality is therefore “a right without a remedy.”¹¹

The American Convention on Human Rights, the human rights treaty organ of the Organization of American States (OAS), also asserts that each person has the right to a nationality, and goes further than the UDHR and its affiliated human rights treaties by declaring that it is a nonderogable right (OAS 1969, Articles 20 and 27). The OAS is also remarkably Arendtian in that it contends that the right to a nationality is not only inviolable, but is “one of the most important rights of man, after the right to life itself, because all the prerogatives, guarantees and benefits man derives from his membership in a political and social community—the State—stem from or are supported by this right” (OAS 1977, n. pag.). The human right to a nationality, therefore, is both an intrinsic and an instrumental human right. It is an essential component of recognized, formal belonging in a world carved into states; yet, as I show in this book, its fulfillment is also necessary for people to access any number of other human rights (from education, work, and healthcare to social security, a juridical personality, and freedom of movement).¹² Moreover, citizenship is of such import in the international sphere that no international norm or recognition of the right to be voluntarily stateless exists. One must be a citizen of somewhere¹³ and there is an international norm against statelessness (Adjami and Harrington 2008, 103; Donner 1994, 196; Spiro 2004, 99; van Waas 2008, 39).

While most states seem to accept the international norm that people must not be deprived arbitrarily of their citizenship, fewer are willing to accept that states must provide membership to the stateless populations on their territory,¹⁴ or that they cannot deny or revoke citizenship from individuals on “reasonable” grounds, even if it renders people stateless. It is for these reasons, and others, that more than ten million people are stateless globally.

Whereas Arendt firmly believed that formal belonging, or citizenship in the state, is necessary to access rights, freedoms, and protections,¹⁵ recent scholarship challenges this position. Beginning with Yasemin Soysal’s Limits of Citizenship (1994), it has become increasingly common for scholars to describe citizenship as a status that is losing importance in a globalizing world of increased migratory movements and human rights provisions. Soysal’s work concretized the concept of postnationalism, wherein “the logic of personhood supersedes the logic of national citizenship” as the “organizing principle of membership in contemporary polities” (Soysal 1994, 164). Through her study of guest workers in several European countries, Soysal argued that citizens and noncitizens were basically treated the same way when it came to rights provisions in state policies. She found that the basis for this similarity in treatment was host-state respect for the human rights regime, which acknowledges the rights of all persons regardless of race, national, or social origin. Soysal therefore posited that

contemporary membership formations have superseded the dichotomy that opposes the national citizen and the alien, by including populations that were previously defined as outside the national polity. Rights that used to belong solely to nationals are now extended to foreign populations, thereby undermining the very basis of national citizenship. (137)

Works from diverse scholarly genres have since taken a postnational orientation and sought to illustrate the changing nature of the citizen-state relationship. Some authors have followed in Soysal’s footsteps by investigating the impact of the human rights regime on state treatment of noncitizens. David Jacobson, for example, contends that the new international order is based upon human rights and has effectively devalued citizenship in the state as it erodes “the distinction between ‘citizen’ and ‘alien’” (1996, 8–9, 39). Linda Bosniak similarly argues that “the status of aliens in liberal democratic societies is, in many respects, hardly distinguishable from that of citizens” (2006, 34) due to noncitizens’ ability to press human rights claims and enjoy the rights of citizenship without possessing formal citizenship status. Seyla Benhabib also concludes in her respective works on noncitizen rights that “one does not have to be part of a territorially defined people to enjoy human rights” (Benhabib 2001, 36).¹⁶

Thus, whereas Arendt deemed personhood insufficient for rights enjoyment, the premise of many scholars writing in the postnational vein is that personhood is enough to access human rights. Bosniak, for instance, directly challenges Arendt’s position by asserting that “Citizenship … is not actually ‘the right to have rights,’ despite the conventional wisdom. In many situations, only personhood is required” (2006, 117). Jean Cohen likewise declares that “many rights that used to be construed exclusively as the rights of citizens are now deemed the rights of persons that must be respected everywhere” (1999, 258). Yishai Blank similarly observes how states are granting “an impressive and ever-growing catalogue of social and economic rights, as well as various political rights” to noncitizens (2007, 438). He further contends that states are “moving in the direction of granting de facto citizenship, that is, the substantive content of citizenship (often devoid of the political rights)” to those who hold no citizenship from anywhere—the stateless (438).

Beside examining the human rights regime’s impact on the citizen-state relationship, other scholars have taken another Limits of Citizenship approach, focusing on “the emergence of membership that is multiple in the sense of spanning local, regional, and global identities, and which accommodates intersecting complexes of rights, duties, and loyalties” (Soysal 1994, 166). Thus while Arendt focused on formal membership in the state, these scholars study the diverse citizenship types or ways of belonging that exist in the contemporary era: from cultural (Kymlicka 1995), transnational (Bauböck 2007), deterritorialized (Ferme 2004; Teune 2009), denationalized (Sassen 2006), documentary (Sadiq 2009), flexible (Ong 1999; Nyamnjoh 2007), (Kostakopoulou 2008), postnational (Soysal 1994; Benhabib and Resnik 2009), post-sovereign (Murphy and Harty 2003), and global (Cabrera 2010) to irregular (Nyers 2011; Ni Mhurchú 2015), quasi (Gilbertson 2006), the “citizenship of aliens” (Bosniak 2006) and “citizenship light” (Caglar 2004). In so doing, they illustrate—contra Arendt—that formal, legal citizenship is no longer so important to act in a polity.

These works tend to directly or indirectly portray formal citizenship in the state as a “waning,” “partially obsolete,” “anachronistic,” “possibly changed institution” or one that is undergoing “crisis” (Benhabib, Shapiro, and Petranovic 2007, 14; Hailbronner 2003, 75; Cohen 1999, 247; Sassen 2006, 280; Benhabib 2004b, 143; McNevin 2011, 143).¹⁷ They question whether “the idea of territorial state citizenship—as distinct from personhood—remain[s] important?” and whether “human rights [are] replacing citizenship as the most important rights-bearing ideas and legal norms?” (Jackson 2009, 443).

Using the statelessness as forced displacement in situ framework, however, I find that the postnational portrayal of a world of blurred boundaries, flexible memberships, and denationalized rights is not global in scope.¹⁸ The boundaries of belonging are hardening against the racial, ethnic, or religious Other and citizenship remains a crucial status to hold to access rights, freedoms, and protections. Moreover, the postnational worldview that democracies are providers of rights based upon personhood, as opposed to citizenship, also needs to be qualified.

Challenging the Postnational Worldview

The majority of postnational-oriented scholarship is limited in two primary ways: first, by its focus on developed world democracies and their provision of rights and protections to noncitizens¹⁹ and, second, by its examination of noncitizens who are not stateless when making claims about the decoupling of human rights from citizenship. With regard to the first limitation, very few works have examined the relationship between citizenship status and access to rights, freedoms, and protections in developing world democracies.²⁰ This is somewhat surprising given that Soysal clearly states that her postnational arguments “are not exclusive to Europe. As the transnational norms and discourse of human rights permeate the boundaries of nation-states, the postnational model is activated and approximated world-wide” (1994, 156).

More recently, Bosniak asserts that “the status of aliens in liberal democratic societies is, in many respects, hardly distinguishable from that of citizens” (2006, 34) as “a great many of the rights commonly associated with equal citizenship and economic citizenship are not confined to status citizens at all but are available to territorially present persons” in “most other liberal democratic states” (117).²¹ Such a position is in line with the accepted truism that democracies promote and protect human rights.²² As Russell Bova notes,

democracy is presumed to foster basic human liberties and freedoms to a degree that is unmatched by authoritarian regimes.… It is, in fact, this connection between democracy, on the one hand, and human rights and liberties, on the other, that constitutes the most powerful argument in favor of democratic government. (2001, 63)

This selection bias toward developed world democracies within the postnational literature results in an overly optimistic assessment of the degree to which citizenship is no longer important to access rights, freedoms, and protections in the contemporary era. It also obfuscates the myriad ways in which democratic regimes can engage in forced displacement within their own borders under nonconflict and noncrisis conditions against the racial, ethnic, or religious Other. I therefore examine the relationship between citizenship, human rights, and the state within developing world democracies to see if postnational claims about the severance of human rights from citizenship are generalizable to the developing world.

As regards the second limitation, I contend that we must examine whether citizenship has lost its significance as the conveyor of rights, freedoms, and protections by choosing as subjects those who are noncitizens everywhere—the stateless. Despite the increased attention that has been given to noncitizens in recent migratory, citizenship, and human rights research, as well as in political theory, scant consideration has been given to the stateless who represent the epitome of what it means to be a noncitizen. The stateless are distinct from refugees, the undocumented, guest workers and their descendants, and other types of noncitizens who may be noncitizens in their country of residence or employment, but who are not necessarily stateless as they have a “country of origin” and are still recognized as citizens under the operation of some state’s law.

Also, unlike the former groups, who in most instances are migrants of one type or another, stateless people are “noncitizen insiders” (Belton 2011). They are insiders because they have not migrated from elsewhere. They are “rooted” as they remain, for the most part, in the states where they were born.²³ They are noncitizens, however, because the state where they were born either rejects them as members or does not fully provide the means by which they can be prevented from falling into statelessness. In both instances, they are forced into liminality and unable to enjoy many of the rights that immigrant noncitizens enjoy because they are not always considered legal or “lawful” residents of the states within which they reside. Moreover, unlike those deemed “unlawful” immigrants, the stateless cannot easily be deported because they do not always have a country of their “own” to which to be returned.²⁴ Indefinite detention is thus often a real possibility (Perks and de Chickera 2009, 49).

It bears mentioning that the stateless are also distinct from refugees. Refugees are sometimes considered de facto stateless because they do not enjoy the protection of their state of citizenship or few (if any) of the rights and freedoms associated with that state’s citizenship. They are defined as persons who have a well-founded fear of persecution in their countries of citizenship because of certain political beliefs that they hold or ascriptive criteria (UN 1951). They consequently flee across an international border in order to seek safety from such persecution.²⁵ Refugees are still typically recognized as nationals under the operation of a given state’s laws, however, and they are not penalized for their “irregular” presence in the same way that stateless people can be. The Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, for example, asks states parties to

not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened in the sense of Article 1, enter or are present in their territory without authorization, provided they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence. (UN 1951, Article 31)

No similar stipulation exists in the statelessness conventions. Stateless people can thus be penalized for their “unlawful” presence by the very states that made them unlawful in the first place via their practices of citizenship deprivation and denial.

Despite this protection gap, and notwithstanding the myriad human rights violations they face, stateless people have yet to be afforded the same type of developed, international protection framework that exists for refugees. As UNHCR senior protection officer Janice Marshal admits, “It is not that we are responsible for every stateless person worldwide, the way we more or less are for refugees because of the statute of the UNHCR” (Voice of America 2009 n. pag.).²⁶ Thus, by focusing upon those who are noncitizens everywhere—the stateless—we can test whether postnational claims about the decoupling of human rights from citizenship are applicable to all noncitizens.

Reconceptualizing Statelessness

While offering a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between citizenship, human rights, and democracies in this book, I also offer a reconceptualization of statelessness itself, adding to the emerging field of statelessness studies. It is only in the past few years that academic research on statelessness has begun to develop. This scholarship has generally been either legal or technical in nature, focusing on differences in nationality laws, lack of birth registration, crises of state succession, and gaps in protection;²⁷ or advocacy-based, describing the living conditions of stateless people, recording human rights violations against them, and making policy suggestions.²⁸ While a few comparative and single-case studies exist,²⁹ no work to date has offered a comparative analysis of statelessness in the developing world democracies of the Caribbean.

Moreover, “although there have been considerable strides in the machinery of human rights, political theory with respect to statelessness has hardly moved on since Arendt’s day” (Sawyer and Blitz 2011, 306). Most recent theoretical work on statelessness has taken two forms: the application of an Arendtian framework to explain how some nonstateless noncitizens—such as the sans papiers and others who live on the fringes of legality within their host states—are in a stateless situation;³⁰ or the analysis of statelessness from a global ethics or justice perspective.³¹ No work to date has argued that statelessness is a form of forced displacement.

Victoria Redclift’s Statelessness and Citizenship: Camps and the Creation of Political Space (2013) is informed by a forced displacement lens through its analysis of the camp-based displacement of the formerly stateless Biharis of Bangladesh. Redclift’s focus, however, is on exposing the messiness of contemporary membership practices and on how individuals are able to negotiate, and maneuver between, the boundaries of citizenship inclusion and exclusion. I come at displacement from a different vantage point. Instead of illustrating how acts of citizenship are performed outside statist understandings of belonging from spaces of displacement,³² I argue in this book that we need to reconceptualize statelessness as a form of forced displacement in situ.³³ One need not be encamped or physically pushed across borders to suffer the effects of displacement from home.

Thus, whereas David Hanauer describes how migrants and their host-state born children “are defined in essentialist terms as representatives of their heritage countries” and “are symbolically returned to their native lands” in the process (2011, 203), the case studies I present in this work reveal that the displacement suffered by the descendants of migrants who are at risk of statelessness is much more than symbolic. As I describe in Chapters 3 and 4, the Bahamian- and Dominican-born offspring of Haitian migrants are forcefully “returned” to a “native land” they have never seen (Haiti) via practices of citizenship denial or deprivation in the countries of their birth.

Moreover, although other noncitizens, such as refugees, travelers, and different types of migrants, have been the subjects of “an explosion of work which considers the role of place in the production of outsiders” or people “who are said to be ‘out-of-place’” (Cresswell 2004, 103), stateless people have not been included in this scholarship. Reconceptualizing statelessness as forced displacement highlights how practices of citizenship deprivation and denial render the stateless “out of place,” disrupting their ability to carry out key life projects, be self-determining agents, and access rights and protections. Furthermore, it illustrates how being forced “out of place,” whether by being rendered liminal subjects or by being made to take on another state’s nationality, affects the stateless’ sense of place identity and belonging in very concrete ways.

Place identity answers the question—Who am I?—by countering—Where am I? or Where do I belong? From a social psychological perspective, place identities are thought to arise because places, as bounded locales imbued with personal, social, and cultural meanings, provide a significant framework in which identity is constructed, maintained, and transformed. Like people, things, and activities, places are an integral part of the social world of everyday life; as such, they become important mechanisms through which identity is defined and situated. (Cuba and Hummon 1993, 112)

When people lack a national home, it affects their “expectations for the future” (Weil 1955 quoted in Relph 1976, 38) and psychologically displaces them, even though they remain physically rooted. They consequently lack “a secure point from which to look out on the world, a firm grasp of [their] position in the order of things” (38). The realm of statelessness then is more than one where the law ceases to operate or where rights are difficult to achieve. It is one, as Arendt recognized, in which one’s place in the world becomes ambiguous, or even outright negated.

Reconceptualizing statelessness as a form of forced displacement in situ is important for several reasons. First, statelessness is a human rights issue that most people do not know exists. As UNHCR admitted, it is “one of the most neglected areas of the global human rights agenda” (UNHCR 2011b, 2). While the plight of refugees, IDPs, and other forced migrants has garnered the attention of the international, humanitarian, policy-making, and scholarly communities over the decades, statelessness has not. It is only in the past three years that the first Global Forum on Statelessness³⁴ was held and that UNHCR launched its global #IBelong Campaign to End Statelessness, even though statelessness has existed since before the organization’s inception and is one of its primary mandates. It is also only in the past few years that scholarly interest in the subject has begun to develop and that regional intergovernmental organizations, such as the OAS and the European Union (EU),³⁵ have begun to address the issue.

The lack of attention given to statelessness is problematic because stateless people, as I describe in Chapters 2 and 5, are susceptible to a range of human rights violations as noncitizens everywhere. As UN Secretary General (UNSG) António Guterres declares, “The daily suffering of millions of stateless people is an affront to humanity” (cited in van Waas 2013, n. pag.). Yet because their situation typically lacks the humanitarian or emergency nature of other types of forced displacement—they may live in democracies and face little to no persecution; they may have never had to leave their home due to conflict or crisis; they may outwardly appear like any citizen you meet—their particular plight has often gone unrecognized or been made secondary to other human rights concerns. But, as I explain later in the text, statelessness is an insidious form of displacement, with invidious effects. Reconceptualizing statelessness as forced displacement in situ thus demands that we consider statelessness as important to address as other types of forced displacement.

Second, embedding statelessness within the forced displacement framework forces us to interrogate our assumptions about the relationship between displacement and movement. In an insightful article, Stephen Lubkemann argues for the need to critically examine the assumed relationship between displacement and mobility that permeates forced migration and refugee studies. Examining the case of the 1977–1992 Mozambican civil war, Lubkemann describes how those who were unable to flee the conflict suffered “a form of displacement in place” (2008, 457) as the war prevented them from using various forms of “mobility-based” coping strategies (464). Because of this, Lubkemann argues that displacement should be redefined as “immobilization” generated by the involuntary “disruption of key life projects” (468, 471n8). Reconceptualizing statelessness as a form of forced displacement that takes place in situ broadens our understanding of the diverse forms that forced displacement can take and illustrates that one does not have to be forced to flee one’s home to suffer its effects. One can be physically rooted, yet displaced.

Third, the forced displacement in situ framework illuminates the myriad, yet subtle, ways in which democracies in nonconflict and noncrisis situations engage in forced displacement. Thus, whereas the focus within forced migration, conflict, and human rights studies has typically been upon those who are made to move (whether internally or externally) as a result of ethnic conflict, insurgency, persecution, foreign invasion, and other types of crises (Wood 1994, 612; Troeller 2003, 50),³⁶ the comparative case analysis presented here reveals that democracies can—and do—engage in the forced displacement of peoples through legal, bureaucratic, and political means that have consequences just as portentous as the more commonly studied drivers of forced migration, such as environmental catastrophe, civil war, or persecution.

Methods

In order to address the aforementioned gaps in the human rights, forced migration, and (non)citizenship literatures, and to challenge the postnational claim that human rights have decoupled from citizenship, I conduct a comparative case study of statelessness in the Caribbean democracies of The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic. I contend that the Caribbean stands as a valid testing ground for evaluating postnational claims about the decoupling of human rights from citizenship because “no other region” in the developing world “has had, for so long, so many liberal democratic polities” (Domínguez 1993, 2).

Freedom House, which scores states according to their practices in the areas of civil liberties and political rights, classifies all the countries in the Caribbean—with the exception of Cuba and Haiti—as “free” (2015, n. pag.). Caribbean states thus score well in the categories of political participation, freedom of speech and of the press, social and economic freedoms, and the rule of law, among other criteria. Specifically, The Bahamas earns the highest freedom scores possible (1 out of 7) in both civil liberties and political rights, while the Dominican Republic scores slightly lower, with a score of 3 and 2 (out of 7) in each category, respectively.

Beside the comparative “liberal/democratic” nature of the region, UNHCR is concerned about statelessness in the Caribbean, making the area a significant case study of this phenomenon from both a policy and an academic vantage. Statelessness is an issue in the region for several reasons. First, several countries do not grant citizenship automatically to children born of noncitizens on their soil if a parent is not a citizen, a permanent resident or legally present. Individuals are thus at risk of statelessness if they are unable to acquire the nationality of their parents and if the state of their birth has no provision in place to grant citizenship to stateless children. For example, and as I explain in Chapters 3 and 4, both The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic have stipulations in their laws that make it difficult to obtain citizenship at birth if one is born to noncitizen or “illegally” resident parents.

Second, few Caribbean states have ratified the two UN statelessness conventions and incorporated preventative measures against statelessness into their national legislation. For instance, only four Caribbean states (Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago)³⁷ have ratified the Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons (UN 1954), which delineates the rights and duties of a stateless person in a state party to the treaty; and only Jamaica has ratified the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which aims to prevent and reduce statelessness globally (UN 1961; UN 2016 Treaty Collection).³⁸ Moreover, the majority of these states lack statelessness status determination (SSD) procedures, making it difficult to determine who is and who is not stateless in a systematic and transparent manner and to thereby furnish the stateless with a legal, protective status.

The problem of statelessness is of such significance in the Caribbean that UNHCR’s office for the Americas stated that one of its four strategic priorities for 2012 was to: “Prevent statelessness in the Caribbean by advocating for accession to international instruments, mapping the population concerned or at risk, providing technical and legal support and helping them with their registration and documentation” (UNHCR 2012e, 96). For 2013, this theme continued as “there will be a strong focus on the prevention and reduction of statelessness and other nationality issues, mainly through birth registration and documentation” (quoted in Belton 2015, 129). And, in 2015, following on the cusp of the successful Cartagena +30 process, the organization declared that one of its strategic priorities is to resolve statelessness in the region (2015c, n. pag.). Furthermore, UNHCR is expressly focused on “ensur[ing] access to a nationality for undocumented people of Haitian descent” (2012e, 97). This policy development is important because, as I explain in Chapters 3 and 4, in both The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic, the two main destination sites for Haitian migrants (IOM 2013, 23), individuals of Haitian descent struggle to obtain, or retain, citizenship.

I chose The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic as case studies not only because they are democracies with a large presence of Haitian migrants and their children—and therefore an increased likelihood of containing populations who are at risk of statelessness—but also because of the notable differences that exist between them. From a demographic perspective, The Bahamas has a much smaller population at just over 350,000 persons (Government of The Bahamas 2012, 1), while the Dominican Republic has a population of around 9.4 million (Government of the Dominican Republic 2010a). The estimated tens of thousands of Haitians and their descendants in The Bahamas therefore make up a larger percentage of the Bahamian population than the estimated 380,000 in the Dominican Republic.³⁹ Additionally, black Bahamians make up the majority of the population in The Bahamas (Government of The Bahamas 2012, 10) and thus share the same racial classification as most Haitian migrants. The DR, on the other hand, consists of a largely mixed population. These racial differences could play a role in mitigating or exacerbating any tensions toward Haitian migrants and their offspring, as well as affect how each community approaches the inclusion of noncitizen insiders.

Culturally, The Bahamas is a mixture of Baptist, Anglican and Catholic adherents, with the majority identifying as Baptist (Government of the Bahamas 2012, 11), while the DR is largely Catholic.⁴⁰ The former was a British colony whose residents’ primary language is English, while the latter was a Spanish colony whose residents’ principal language is Spanish. From a legal and political perspective, The Bahamas and the DR are also distinct. The Bahamas is a common law country, while the DR observes continental legal praxis (“civil law”). Although both states are classified as democracies, The Bahamas operates under the Westminster-style parliamentary system and the DR is a republic headed by a presidency. Significant differences thus exist between the two cases, yet both states engage in exclusionary membership practices that primarily affect individuals of Haitian descent. By choosing to undertake fieldwork in two countries that exhibit significant demographic, cultural, and institutional differences—and that similarly generate forced displacement on their territories—I strengthen the external validity of my findings (Leedy and Ormrod 2005, 99–100).

I undertook fieldwork in The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic between 2009 and 2013 to examine how each state’s laws operated in practice with regard to the fulfillment of a human right to a nationality and to investigate how lack of formal membership in a state affects a person’s sense of place identity and ability to be a self-determining agent. The 2009 fieldwork in The Bahamas was exploratory in nature as questions of citizenship denial and potential statelessness had not yet been investigated, whether by academics, policymakers, lawyers, or other experts. I was thus trying to establish whether statelessness existed, why it existed if it did (through which procedures or processes), where it existed (specific islands), and what ethnic groups were affected. I therefore conducted the 2009 interviews under the condition of anonymity for the study participants because I wanted them to speak as freely, and provide as much information as they could, on questions surrounding citizenship, discrimination, and national identity, given these subjects’ sensitive nature in the country.

I conducted sixteen anonymous interviews in 2009.⁴¹ Fourteen of these took place in the capital, Nassau, while the remaining two were conducted via telephone. Participants included former and current government officials, academics, community leaders, lawyers, a civil servant, a journalist, an amateur film documentarian, and a graduate student who had worked in the local Haitian communities. None of those interviewed were stateless or at risk of statelessness, but two were Haitian and held prominent positions in the Haitian community. Due to lack of data on statelessness in The Bahamas, I purposely selected the majority of the participants because they held (or had held) leadership positions in the foreign affairs or immigration sectors of government or the nascent human rights community, or were experts on Bahamian migration or nationality law and data collection.

I returned to The Bahamas in the fall of 2012 to carry out a second wave of interviews. I interviewed thirteen individuals in Nassau and seven in Marsh Harbour, Abaco. Participants included lawyers, activists, elected and appointed officials, educators, businesspersons, healthcare professionals, a police and a defense force officer, as well as the Haitian ambassador and Bahamian-born students of Haitian descent from the College of The Bahamas (COB).⁴² An official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs provided the Ministry’s perspective via email. Of the twenty-one persons interviewed in 2012, eight had either faced the risk of statelessness or were stateless at some point.⁴³ As in the 2009 study, I performed purposeful sampling, but limited such sampling to government officials and lawyers. I obtained interviews with the other participants via snowball sampling or because I came into contact with them at a public forum on statelessness⁴⁴ at COB and requested interviews from them.

Those who participated in the 2012 portion of the study reflected a broad set of opinions: from those affected by statelessness and those affected by the presence of Bahamian-born individuals of Haitian descent in their communities, to those who held leadership positions in diverse professions that come into contact with individuals of Haitian descent (such as the armed forces, the police, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, health professionals, lawyers, and teachers). In total, I interviewed thirty-seven individuals for the Bahamian case study. Of these, twenty-three were Bahamian of non-Haitian descent, seven were registered or naturalized Bahamians,⁴⁵ six were foreign residents (American or Haitian), and the remaining person was born in The Bahamas of Haitian descent who had not yet applied to register as a Bahamian. The majority of the interviewees were black (twenty-seven) and male (twenty-four).

In addition to the thirty-seven interviews from The Bahamas, I traveled to the Dominican Republic in the summer of 2012 and the spring of 2013. I interviewed ten individuals in the capital, Santo Domingo, and five in the batey⁴⁶ of El Caño in the province of Monte Plata. Four of the five participants from the batey were stateless, while one had previously been in that situation but now had her documents to prove Dominican citizenship. The interviewees from Santo Domingo consisted of two UN officials, nongovernmental organization (NGO) activists, lawyers, a diplomat from the Haitian Embassy, academics, as well as the local representative of the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI). Of the fifteen interviewees, six were Dominican (one had previously been stateless), five were foreign residents, and four were presently stateless or unable to prove Dominican nationality. The majority of the interviewees were black⁴⁷ (ten) and female (ten).

Participants for this part of the fieldwork once again reflect diverse viewpoints on the effects, and existence, of statelessness in the country. As in the Bahamian 2009 portion of the study, I selected the majority of the interviewees from Santo Domingo via purposeful sampling, although a few individuals were contacted via the snowball technique. I did not purposefully select the participants from El Caño, however. I was part of a group that went to listen to a town hall meeting on nationality deprivation in that batey and I consequently ended up informally interviewing five of the attendees (all women). Two additional interviews were conducted in New York City with two other members of OSJI earlier in 2012 on the subject of statelessness in the Caribbean.

In all cases, with the exception of the email interview response from the Bahamian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I recorded and transcribed the interviews. Since I am interested in the participants’ experiences with, and knowledge of statelessness, noncitizen rights, and state membership practices, the interviews were semistructured. I did not constrain our conversations solely to the interview questions that I had, but was open to the interviewee leading the dialogue in other directions. This often allowed me to discover information that I had not originally thought was important or pointed me to new directions of inquiry. The semistructured interview approach therefore allowed me to collect a series of responses to common questions, but also added a richness to the narratives that I perhaps would not have been able to capture otherwise. Such an approach, I believe, is appropriate for examining the lived realities of exclusionary state membership practices and their effects upon people’s sense of belonging and ability to access rights in practice.

Besides the fifty-five semistructured interviews, I engaged in participant observation in a number of settings in the Caribbean and the United States as a means of assessing how individuals engage with each other on questions surrounding statelessness, migration, and human rights. In 2009, I attended the Second Annual Youth Conclave, sponsored by the United Haitian Association of The Bahamas, which addressed problems of discrimination and ways to empower the Haitian-descended youth in the country. Many of the young people present had faced obstacles growing up in The Bahamas and felt ostracized.

In 2012, I attended a coyuntura (town hall meeting) on the effects of Dominican migration law at the Centro Bonó⁴⁸ in Santo Domingo where members of the public, Dominican lawyers, and migration experts from the International Organization for Migration discussed the effects of Dominican migration law upon persons of Haitian descent. I also witnessed an impromptu celebration at the Centro Bonó when a group of Dominicans of Haitian descent, deprived of their citizenship documents, came to the organization to thank it for the legal assistance it had provided to them. Also in 2012, I attended an event commemorating the life and work of Dominican activist Sonia Pierre⁴⁹ at Columbia University in New York City, listening to the stories that her children, close friends, and colleagues shared with the audience.

In 2013, I attended a panel discussion on statelessness hosted by the Sociocultural Movement for Haitian Workers (MOSCTHA-USA),⁵⁰ also at Columbia University, and participated in an invitation-only symposium hosted by the Centro Bonó, the Mesa Nacional para Migrantes y Refugiados (MENAMIRD), the Red de Encuentro Dominico-Haitiano Jacques Viau, and the Observatorio Migrantes del Caribe (OBMICA) in Santo Domingo. Both events focused on the right to a nationality in the Dominican context and included speakers from the Dominican government and civil society.⁵¹ I took part in a similar, but public, conference on statelessness at the College of The Bahamas in 2012⁵² and listened via the internet to the follow-up conference that took place in 2014.⁵³ At the invitation of the Norwegian Refugee Council, I was also part of the civil society team that took part in the Caribbean subregional deliberations in Cayman for UNHCR’s Cartagena +30 process, from which a regional Plan of Action for the Americas resulted that includes a chapter on statelessness.⁵⁴

As a Bahamian, I have spent many hours in The Bahamas informally chatting with “citizens” and “noncitizens” at supermarkets, retail stores, religious venues, and in their homes about Bahamian membership practices, Haitian migrants, and discrimination. I have thus had multiple opportunities to hear diverse viewpoints on citizenship denial and deprivation, the issues associated with statelessness, and the efforts that have been, or should be, undertaken to alleviate the problem.

In addition to fieldwork, I use various primary and secondary sources to challenge the postnational claim of the decoupling of human rights from citizenship and to examine the ways in which democracies engage in forced displacement. I examine the nationality, migration laws, and constitutions of The Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti—as well as legal assessments by experts on the latter country—to identify how individuals ought to be covered as nationals under a given law in theory. I stress “in theory” because, in practice, individuals may fall under the operation of a given state’s law as a national, but in reality they do not possess said state’s citizenship. Both The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic, for example, deny that statelessness is an issue on their territories. They point to Article 11 of the Haitian Constitution, which declares that any person born of a Haitian mother or father who has not renounced her or his Haitian citizenship is also a Haitian at birth (Government of Haiti 2011). These governments’ position is that the offspring of Haitian migrants born on their soil are Haitian citizens through their parents. It therefore does not matter whether or not they have Bahamian or Dominican citizenship.

Yet, as UNHCR’s Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons makes clear, determining whether an individual is stateless “requires a careful analysis of how a State applies its nationality laws in an individual’s case in practice” (2014g, 12; italics added). UNHCR asserts that “The reference to ‘law’ in Article 1(1) [of the 1954 statelessness convention] should be read broadly to encompass not just legislation, but also ministerial decrees, regulations, orders, judicial case law (in countries with a tradition of precedent) and, where appropriate, customary practice” (12) when determining whether a person is stateless. Such an approach, they contend, “may lead to a different conclusion than one derived from a purely objective analysis of the application of nationality laws of a country to an individual’s case” (13). Using such an approach, I find—and illustrate in Chapters 3 and 4—that many individuals of Haitian descent, born in The Bahamas or the Dominican Republic of Haitian migrants do not fall under the operation of Haitian law in practice. They are consequently forced into liminality—a place where they are denied or deprived of formal belonging to the country of their birth, but unable to enjoy effective nationality from their alleged country of nationality (Haiti).

I also assess the status of these countries’ treaty ratifications regarding statelessness or the right to a nationality,⁵⁵ and the reports of various NGOs and the UN on the subject to understand what treaty obligations these states ought to have and whether they are fulfilling them in practice. I examine pertinent judicial cases in the Dominican context as well—such as the Case of the Girls Yean and Bosico v. the Dominican Republic (IACtHR 2005) and Sentence TC/0168/13 (Government of the Dominican Republic 2013e)—to understand their impact on Dominican membership practices.

Using my interview data and these primary and secondary sources, I demonstrate that far from being an institution whose “limits” have become “inventively irrelevant” (Soysal 1994, 162), citizenship in a state is increasingly important to access and exercise rights, as well as corresponding freedoms and protections, especially for those who are noncitizens everywhere. Moreover, states continue to jealously guard their sovereign right to demarcate and defend these limits, even if under the cover of seemingly neutral laws or bureaucratic procedures. This results in a form of forced displacement that is just as injurious as the forced displacement that we typically associate with movement under crisis or conflict conditions.

Because I find that citizenship continues to be a necessary status to hold in our allegedly postnational era, I move from theory testing to theory building in the final part of the book and offer a just membership framework for addressing statelessness. I contend that interpreting statelessness through such a framework is crucial in a world where states engage in arbitrary and discriminatory membership practices under the cover of law and where a large gap exists between the operation of said law and practice.

Book Overview

In order to make the case that the stateless face a peculiar and injurious form of forced displacement, even as they remain physically rooted in the countries of their birth, the book is divided into three parts. This first section, “Reconsidering Forced Displacement,” discusses the debate over the relevance of citizenship in an era of human rights and the alleged waning of state sovereignty. It situates my argument in the existing scholarship on citizenship, noncitizenship, statelessness, and forced migration, describing why statelessness is an issue of global, regional, community, and individual import. This section underscores the lack of attention that has been paid to the stateless (those who do not cross borders but who are nevertheless “noncitizen”) and illustrates how the focus on mobility within forced migration studies, especially as a result of conflict, persecution, or crisis, has served to make the plight of these populations largely invisible. It also draws attention to the ways liberal democracies around the world have engaged in practices that render people liminal subjects or make noncitizens out of citizens in the post-9/11 environment. This book thus speaks to broader questions of belonging, democratic regime behavior, and human rights access globally.

The second part, “Democracies as Engines of Forced Displacement,” forms the empirical backbone of the book. Herein I provide support for the argument presented in the first section that liberal democracies are engaging in practices of forced displacement against those they consider “Other” within. While human rights and postnational scholarship tend to portray liberal democracies as those that allow for a person to enjoy rights, freedoms, and protections without formally belonging to the state, I use data gathered from the aforementioned original field interviews, supported by other primary and secondary sources, to demonstrate how the developing world democracies of The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic are forcibly displacing Bahamian- and Dominican-born persons of Haitian descent into liminality or making them become Haitian nationals against their will.

It should be noted that while the stateless have occasionally been referred to as liminals—or some such similar term—no work to date has used anthropologist Victor Turner’s work on liminality to assess whether the stateless are indeed liminals. I use Turner’s markers of “invisibility,” “impurity,” “rightlessness,” and “reflection,” which describe the liminal’s condition and state of mind during liminality, to examine how liminality affects the stateless. While the stateless face varying degrees of invisibility and rightlessness, as well as treatment as “impure,” unlike Turner’s liminals, they do not share the ability to return to society (or the communities of their birth) on their own terms and with a new identity (citizenship in the case of the stateless). They thus remain displaced in the realm of the “betwixt and between.”

The final portion of the book, “Noncitizen Insiders and the Right to Belong,” explains the effects of forced displacement in situ upon people who are “noncitizen insiders” (Belton 2011); that is, those who are neither migrants nor citizens of the country of their birth and residence. Drawing on the detailed findings of my case studies, I demonstrate how rooted displacement affects these people’s sense of identity, as well as their ability to enjoy human rights and be self-determining agents. It is here that I conclude that the greatest “calamity” to befall the stateless is not that they lack the “right to belong to some kind of organized community” (Arendt [1948] 2004, 377), but that they lack the right to belong to the specific communities of their birth. I therefore propose a “human right to belong” and justify it over the conventional understanding that states alone should determine their membership.

Chapter Summaries

Chapter 2 provides an overview of statelessness beginning with Arendt’s experience and ending with its contemporary development. It describes the many ways in which a person may become stateless, the problems associated with this condition from an individual, community, and state vantage point, and international efforts to address it. The chapter demonstrates that exclusion from an “organized [political] community,” as in Arendt’s time, continues to be problematic in the twenty-first century. In contradistinction to Arendt’s time, however, Chapter 2 shows that statelessness is not a “Europe-only” phenomenon, one of cross-border movements, or one that is necessarily generated by conflict, crisis, or persecution. Stateless people are found globally, within all regime types, and are generally physically rooted in a place, even though displaced in other ways.

Chapters 3 and 4 bring the discussion of global statelessness to the state level with case studies of The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic, respectively. These chapters detail how democracies can forcibly displace people under noncrisis and nonconflict situations via legal, political, and bureaucratic means. Specifically, Chapter 3 explains how seemingly neutral citizenship laws, when situated within a politicized citizenship-granting process and combined with bureaucratic inefficiencies, work together to displace Bahamian-born persons of primarily Haitian descent⁵⁶ into liminality or into the category of Haitian national, often without confirming that said persons are Haitian nationals in practice.

Chapter 4 continues the analysis of how the human right to a nationality is implemented in practice by examining the ways in which the Dominican state erects boundaries of belonging against the racialized “Other” within its borders. Via constitutional amendment, the retroactive application of laws, and arbitrary bureaucratic procedures, the chapter demonstrates how people can be turned into foreigners in their own country. Both chapters thus illustrate the precariousness of belonging under state-defined conditions and the ways in which individuals can be forcibly displaced while remaining “in place.”

Whereas Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate how two democracies of the developing world are engaging in forced displacement within their territories, Chapter 5 examines the effects of forced displacement in situ from an individual perspective. Using Victor Turner’s analysis of liminality as a basis, the chapter illustrates how statelessness affects an individual’s sense of belonging, his or her ability to access human rights, and prospects of being a fully self-determining agent. It thus demonstrates that the consequences of not being a citizen of somewhere in practice has ramifications far beyond the legal realm and it directly challenges the postnational claim that human rights have decoupled from citizenship.

The sixth and final chapter takes into account the forced nature of the stateless’ displacement, making the case that the fulfillment of the human right to a nationality and the resolution of statelessness are matters of global distributive justice (GDJ). It is here I argue for a human right to belong that is predicated upon individual agency and choice and is less statist in orientation than current membership practices. For noncitizen insiders, this right consists of formally belonging to a specific place from birth—the state in which one was born—and the right to choose to continue to belong at maturity.

In conclusion, Statelessness in the Caribbean asks that we move our gaze inward to evaluate the effects of practices of citizenship deprivation and denial enacted upon those who come from within our own polities. As individuals who try to make their life within the state of their birth, even as it excludes them, the stateless suffer a form of forced displacement that is not unlike that faced by other types of forced migrants. They, too, are susceptible to human rights violations and face significant limitations on their ability to carry out key life projects. They are, in effect, displaced even as they remain rooted in the communities of their birth.