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 net benefits. These claims are “supported” with economic models showing that migrants eventually bring about increases in GDP.
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 like tax burdens and government amenities. Moreover, migrants tend to demand procedural political rights such as citizenship and voting. Often, these migrations are easily managed when they take place gradually, and thus their economic benefits are more unambiguous. Unrestrained, large scale migrations, on the other hand, are quite different.
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.
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 percent 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. It seems many 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 problem. How long will it be before these new migrants start demanding citizenship and the vote?
Consequently, 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.
Even before Abinader’s first term began in 2020, though, the Dominican regime (in 2013) effectively abolished birthright citizenship. This was introduced to a lessen 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 Developing World Illustrates the Problem with Open-Border Theories
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.
The situation in the Dominican Republic shows the problem with the theories of open-border advocates who have nearly always directed their rhetoric only at wealthy countries—and especially large wealthy countries. After all, only large wealthy countries have a tax base that makes it relatively easy to pay for more infrastructure, law enforcement, and schooling that come with surges in migrant populations. Only large countries can absorb waves of migrants without exposing the native population to geopolitical and domestic upheavals.
[Read More: “Why Open Borders Don’t Work for Small Countries“ by Ryan McMaken]
What do the open-borders advocates offer in return for all these political and economic changes? The open-borders people will promise a small or moderate increase in GDP over the long term. That might sound convincing to first-world economists ensconced in their academic departments. But, few taxpayers and workers of the developing world are going to be convinced it’s wonderful to pay all the costs of unrestrained migration up front, and then hope some economic benefits materialize down the line. For residents of the developing world, whose economic situation is far more precarious that in the wealthy West, every additional dollar—or peso—that is taxed away to support new migrants is noticeable.
And then there is the problem of political change. The open-borders models usually assume that political and market institutions remain static even as populations change radically due to unrestrained migrations. It is assumed that the new residents will not make changes to the political and economic status quo that made the country a destination for migrants in the first place. This is not how it works in the real world, of course. Major migrations tend to bring major political changes, and residents of the developing world are often acutely aware of this.
The risks of this sort of shift in political power are also especially dangerous inside a country with democratic institutions like the DR. 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 participation is reserved to a small minority of the native population.
As Ludwig von Mises noted in his work on the political effects of demographic majorities, it matters a lot which ethnic, linguistic, and national groups constitute the majority inside a polity. Mises understood that when a majority group becomes a minority, it suffers a significant loss in terms of political self-determination and members of the minority may even become second-class citizens. The smaller the country, the more likely this is to happen as a result of immigration. It’s easy to sympathize with Dominicans who don’t want to wake up one day to discover they are now subject to a ruling majority or ethnic Haitians inside the DR. Given the long history of conflict between Dominicans and Haitians, this is hardly an unfounded fear.
Fundamentally, given the size of the DR and its proximity to Haiti, to erase the border with Haiti would likely result in making the Dominican Republic a lot more like Haiti. That clearly would be an economic and political disaster for the Dominican people.
