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Publication Date

Spring 2026

Abstract

This paper examines the rise of anti-immigration politics in the Dominican Republic, asking the question: why and how did exclusionary policies targeting Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent become viable in this specific context? I contend that contemporary deportation and denationalization policies cannot be explained solely by factors such as economic anxiety, cultural backlash, or right-wing contagion. Instead, anti-immigration politics can take hold when politicians draw on historically constructed processes of “othering” and utilize existing bureaucratic tools to carry out exclusionary policies. Through qualitative analysis of scholarly literature, government documents, international human rights reports, political speeches, and legal rulings and decisions, I trace how the Dominican Republic’s long history of anti-Haitian identity formation, which was institutionalized under the Trujillo dictatorship and maintained through state bureaucracy, laid the groundwork, both ideologically and administratively, for President Luis Abinader’s current mass deportation policies. While scholars have examined identity formation dynamics in the Dominican Republic and Haiti at length, this paper contributes to comparative scholarship on anti-immigration politics by illuminating the bureaucratic and institutional dimensions of how that identity formation translated into racialized exclusionary governance—a connection that the field’s dominant theoretical frameworks have not fully addressed.

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