Private violence supplements government efforts. Reported Arian Terrill, a DR aid worker, many of those who “voluntarily” depart for Haiti “are actually leaving under harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence by the security forces and Dominican street gangs acting as plainclothes proxies.”

Diaz, who was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to New Jersey at the age of six, went to Washington on Thursday with the Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat, there to urge the US government to take action to curb what they said was the persecution of large numbers of immigrants, mainly Haitians, in the Dominican Republic.

At the heart of the situation is an often-overlooked distinction between undocumented foreign workers who were recruited by the Dominican state or by companies, and those who crossed the border illegally and lack a valid visa. While every government has a sovereign right to document and count its foreign workers, in this case the process fails to distinguish between different categories of migrants: the unlawful and the undocumented.

On the beach, the women stick around to direct their cargo to waiting tap-tap trucks, bound for nearby storage depots that act as hubs for the small retailers across southern Haiti that sell peasants their soap and staples. Then they head home for some well-earned rest. The women are known as Madam Saras. They’re familiar figures in Haiti, named for migrant Sara birds that line the country’s trees in chattering groups. In a nation filled with broken infrastructure and stalled development schemes, where the “informal sector” makes up eighty-five per cent of trade, the Madam Saras are crucial cogs. They’re responsible for getting produce from Haiti’s rural farmers to its cities, and getting goods from across the border to all Haitians. The job is hard, “but a good living,”

El tema es que el 8% de la población dominicana es extranjera, o sea, unas 800.000 personas, en números redondos, la mayoría en una situación de precariedad jurídica. En tal virtud se dictó la ley 169/14, que regularizó a 55.000 personas, hijos de padres extranjeros pero con algún documento dominicano de residencia, y a y 9.000 que no contaban con ninguna documentación.