News Information

• NEWS_POSTED_BY: Haiti Place
• NEWS_POSTED_ON: Aug 04, 2015
• Views : 727
• Category : General News
• Description : Yamiche Alcindor, USA TODAY 4:42 p.m. EDT July 31, 2015
  
  Calls for Dominican Republic boycott increase over denying citizenship to Haitian descendants. Yamiche Alcindor, USA TODAY
  
  
  
• Location : Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
• Website : http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/07/30/dominican-republic-tourists-haiti-citizenship-immigration-boycott/30384635/

Overview

• SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — Jude Payoute of Atlanta tried to cancel his $6,000 family vacation here after learning about calls to boycott this Caribbean nation for denying citizenship to thousands of Haitian descendants.
  
  "I'm ashamed to tell my friends I'm here," said Payoute, 64, a native Haitian who immigrated to the United States in the 1980s, as he walked around Santo Domingo's 16th-century city. "It's wrong for me to come here supporting the economy of the Dominican Republic because they are racist and they have no decency and they treat people like trash."
  
  Such strong feelings could force this country to pay a steep price in its dispute with neighboring Haiti if sought-after tourists decide to spend their vacations at other nearby Caribbean islands.
  
  At issue is the mass exodus of crowds into Haiti this summer because of a crackdown on non-citizen residents stemming from a 2013 Dominican Republic Supreme Court ruling that people born between 1929 and 2010 to non-citizen parents did not qualify as Dominican citizens. The decision retroactively stripped away the citizenship of tens of thousands of native Dominicans of Haitian ancestry.
  
  The Dominican government subsequently created a plan to restore nationality for thousands of people who could prove they were born in the country to non-citizens. The government also said it would grant legal residency to non-citizens — many of them Haitian workers — who could prove they arrived before October 2011.
  
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