Earlier this month, the regime of the Dominican Republic (DR) announced new efforts to deport 10,000 Haitians “per week.” The DR reportedly expelled 67,000 Haitians in the first half of the year, as part of a stated plan by the administration of Dominican President Luis Abinader to curtail an ongoing surge of foreign nationals arriving from Haiti.
This is only the latest part of an ongoing campaign against the flood of Haitian foreign nationals which has grown sizably since the 2010 Haitian earthquake. The wave of Haitians into the DR has been sustained in more recent years by the disintegration of the Haitian state and continued gang violence that ensures chaos in Haiti.
The backlash against Haitians living in the DR is, unfortunately, what we would expect in these situations. Contrary to the naïve thought experiments of open-borders economists like Bryan Caplan, large and fast demographic changes brought about by unrestrained migration impose many costs on natives. These costs diminish or cancel out what gains that might be realized from the import of cheap labor. Rather, large flows of migrants produce domestic conflict, geopolitical tensions, and calls for more active government intervention. All of this diminishes the quality of life and standard of living of the native population. Open-border advocates, however, would have us believe that open borders bring nothing but benefits. These claims are “supported” with economic models showing that migrants bring about increases in GDP—or similar economic indicators.
In real life, however, the situation is far more complicated. Migrants are not mere “economic inputs” like manufactured goods, but are persons that impact local realities of tax burdens and government amenities. Moreover, migrants tend to demand procedural political rights such as citizenship and voting, and this imposes new costs on the domestic population. Often, these migrations are easily managed when they take place gradually, and thus their economic benefits are more unambiguous. On the other hand, migrations can become extremely destabilizing when the volume of immigrants is large or rapidly increasing.
This can all be seen playing out now in the Dominican Republic, even though the border between Haiti and the DR isn’t even “open.” The border has simply been—until recently—very porous, and over the past twenty years, it is likely that more than two million Haitian nationals have poured across the border into a country with fewer than 12 million residents. Were the border actually open, we’d likely be looking at an even more tense political situation, perhaps even marked by widespread mob violence.
Haitian-Dominican Migration by the Numbers
Haiti is best described as a failed, impoverished, and violent polity. According to the Associated Press, ”Gangs in Haiti control 80% of the Port-au-Prince capital, and the violence has left nearly 700,000 Haitians homeless in recent years,” 500,000 others have recently emigrated to the DR. It’s easy to see why Haitians migrate in such large numbers to the DR, which has over the past fifty years become a middle-income country with a GDP per capita similar to that of Serbia.
The overwhelming majority of the hundreds of thousands of Haitians displaced in recent years have ended up in the Dominican Republic. The total population of the DR is 11.4 million, and official estimates state there are about 495,000 Haitians living in the country. Yet, some estimates state that as early as 2007 there were over 800,000 Haitian nationals living in the DR. This number has likely only ballooned since then given that the 2010 Haitian earthquake produced hundreds of thousands of additional homeless individuals in the country. Many of those emigrated through “unofficial” means, and remain undocumented. According to the Organization of American states, as much as 95 percent of Haitian migrants to the DR are undocumented, and today there may be 1.9 million undocumented Haitians living in the DR. In other words, a conservative estimate suggests more than ten percent of the DR’s residents arrived from Haiti over the past twenty years. That’s without an open border.
The Anti-Haitian Backlash
This swift and drastic demographic change has created significant political and social problems. While undocumented Haitian nationals are often not legally eligible for social benefits, they do, nonetheless, use public services such as primary schools, roads, and other “public goods.” The locals have taken notice.
Even if the per capita utilization of taxpayer-funded amenities is relatively small, the enormous volume of Haitian immigrants creates alarm and resentment among some native-born Dominican taxpayers. There are even reports of isolated incidents of violence and intimidation against migrants. This may not be laudable, but it is certainly understandable when we consider that most ordinary Dominicans are quite poor by North American or western European standards. While the Dominican Republic has—in contrast to the Haitian basket case—made sizable economic gains in recent decades, few Dominicans enjoy a lot of disposable income. Most are not especially in favor of their taxes being used to subsidize new arrivals from Haiti.
The presence of such large numbers of Haitian nationals also presents a political challenge. How long will it be before these new migrants start demanding citizenship and the vote? And what will that mean for the existing residents? Many native Dominicans would rather not find out.
Consequently, after many years of a rising influx of Haitian nationals, the Abinader regime now receives widespread public support in its efforts to deport Haitians. Abinader was re-elected in May of this year, and support for more deportations was a much-touted part of his campaign’s platform. In fact, during the campaign, both of the two top candidates promised aggressive measures against Haitian foreign nationals living in the Dominican Republic. Abinader remains one of the Americas’ most popular heads of state.
This trend is not new with Abinader, though. Even before the beginning of Abinader’s first term in 2020, the Dominican regime (in 2013) abolished birthright citizenship for children born to undocumented Haitians on Dominican soil. This was introduced to address the fears of many native Dominicans by lessening the potential for Haitians forming an influential political bloc within the DR itself. After all, looking at the state of Haiti for the past two hundred years, it is understandable that the Dominicans would not want Haitians having much of a say in how the DR is run.
The unfortunate irony here is that experience shows many Dominicans know they benefit from Haitian migrants who work in the hospitality and agriculture sectors. The political problems we now see only tend to arise when migrant totals become very large.
The Developing World Illustrates the Problem with Open-Border Theories
The situation in the Dominican Republic shows the problem with the theories of open-border advocates who have nearly always directed their rhetoric at wealthy countries—and especially large wealthy countries. This makes sense since open-borders theory only makes much sense at all to native residents in the context of a large wealthy country like the United States. The contention is that large wealthy countries can easily afford the short-term costs of unrestricted migration, and that there are big long-term economic benefits to large numbers of migrants.
Only large wealthy countries can afford to indulge in such theories. For example, large wealthy countries have stronger state institutions that can more easily regulate and subsidize migrant populations. Large countries can also handle a large influx of migrants without radical changes to geopolitical realities.
This is not the case for small or developing countries. As I’ve noted about small countries—including rich small countries—open borders often invite geopolitical conflict and even outright foreign occupation.
Small developing countries (like the DR) face similar problems. For example, if the border between Haiti and the DR were truly an open border, the 11.4 million residents of the DR could expect a wave of several million Haitians over the next year. (Haiti has a larger population than the DR.) The percentage of foreign-born residents in the DR would likely rise to 30-50 percent. Dominicans would find themselves the minority in many parts of the country.
As a new majority (or large minority) in the DR, the newly arrived Haitians are unlikely to be content with not having citizenship or a vote. Thus, powerful Haiti-focused political pressure groups would get to work and Dominicans might even soon find themselves subject to a new majority composed of impoverished new arrivals from a different ethnic and linguistic group. (In his books Liberalism and Nation, State, and Economy, Ludwig von Mises explains why this is a problem.)
The DR’s efforts to deport and Haitians and deny citizenship reflects the political realities of unrestrained migration. This is why countries with majority-migrant populations are all authoritarian Arab states like the UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait. In these cases, the native population is only willing to tolerate enormous migrant worker populations because political power is reserved to a small minority of the native population.
The simplistic model offered by most open-borders advocates ignores most all of this. The open-borders model assumes that political and market institutions remain static even as populations change radically, and that native populations need only sit back and get richer as the new influx of migrant labor brings about an economic boom. This is not how it works in the real world, and residents of the developing world are often acutely aware of this.
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