Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse

3. Silent Subjectivities: Testimony and Haitian Labor Refugees

3 / Silent Subjectivities: Testimony and Haitian Labor Refugees In the present climate, no census can establish the Haitian and DominicoHaitian population objectively. The composition of the population is equally unknown. No more that 25 percent of rayanos (as the sons and daughters of Haitians born in the Dominican Republic are pejoratively called) have been granted legal Dominican status, according to an estimate by the Dominican-Haitian Cultural Center. —andré corten and isis duarte, “five hundred thousand haitians in the dominican republic.” Not having one’s papers in order in our societies is a form of civil death. —seyla benhabib, the rights of others: aliens, residents, and citizens In chapters 1 and 2, I analyzed the implications of witnessing the conditions of Haitian boat refugees on the open seas. As I discussed, the U.S. government has systematically cast Haitians as economic migrants, thereby disqualifying them from official refugee status. In chapters 3 and 4, I explore how global capitalism, particularly that tied to U.S. policies, creates conditions in which laborers become refugees. Thus, I challenge the false dichotomy of political versus economic factors used to determine refugee status and address the precarious status of Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic by focusing, among other things, on U.S. economic interests in the Dominican Republic as contributing factors in the exploitation of Haitians. The neoliberal policies deployed by the United States since World War II in particular have had profound effects throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. Free Trade policies like NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI), General System of Preferences (GSP) and development programs of the IMF and World Bank have weakened the sovereignty of many Caribbean and Latin American nations by reorganizing political and social structures of nations and contributing to impoverishment that has propelled many people into the transnational labor market. The latest manifestations of 132 / silent subjectivities global capitalism, however, are not entirely new conditions for the Caribbean . The antecedents of the current circulation of labor and capital in the region lie with colonialism. European empire-building relied upon the establishment of monocultural production (and slave labor) for the accumulation of capital. Late nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury U.S. expansion also put in motion the conditions of capital and labor that we find today. In his critique of Jürgen Habermas’s Eurocentric notion of cosmopolitanism , Pheng Cheah sums up the trap in which Third World states often find themselves in the global capitalist world: “Postcolonial states forced to undergo structural adjustment, especially those in Africa and Latin America, are too impoverished to provide social welfare to their citizens. Worse still, states adopting the neoliberal path of export-oriented industrial development actively sacrifice the welfare of their people to provide conditionstoattracttransnationalcapitalflows.Thisscenarioisnotexactly friendly to any of the three aspects of democratic will-formation (political participation, the expression of political will, or the public use of reason) which Habermas desires and celebrates.”1 In other words, the weakening of economies brought about by neoliberal policies in postcolonial states weakens democratic processes, alienating citizens from political participation . While labor conditions would not seem to be as urgent as warfare, torture, or other atrocities that propel refugee movements, poverty and worker abuses signal more quotidian forms of violence. If refugees are created through their banishment from the polity and a state cannot ensure the welfare of its citizens during times of political persecution, so too can economic conditions create similarly precarious conditions for citizenry, especially for those who work outside their nation of origin. Regarding the Caribbean, Teresita Martínez-Verge and Franklin Knight assert, “Globalization, in short, has not so far resulted in a market relationship between the various participants that is more equitable and just. Rather it has accentuated hegemonies and manifestly reinforced global inequality.”2 For example, the majority of the laborers who have migrated from south to north in the Americas exists at the bottom rung of the transnational migration ladder and experiences some of the worst exploitation. In fact, the home nation is often incapable of providing protections—as in the case of Haiti—because of dictatorship, war, and poverty facilitated through U.S. foreign policies. Workers can often find themselves in conditions as precarious as those they left in their nation of origin; they are still vulnerable to human rights abuses, which reflect the uneven spread of global capitalism. silent subjectivities / 133 Noting the...