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Bringing the Border to Baby: Birth Registration as Bordering Practice for Migrant Women’s Children
- For development
- Summary created: 2021
This research explores the ways babies born to migrant and refugee women are being excluded from birth registration and calls for rights defenders to recognize and resist these practices, focusing on the Dominican Republic’s denial of birth certificates for people of Haitian descent.
This research outlined how birth registration requirements are made more restrictive in migration receiving countries as a means of discouraging migration and excluding their descendants from citizenship or accessing rights.
It provided an overview of some exclusionary birth registration practices in the United States (Texas) and Israel which may prevent migrants (particularly women) and their families from obtaining birth certificates for their children. Focusing mainly on birth registration practices in the Dominican Republic which create a risk of statelessness for descendants of Haitian migrants.
Insights
Border enforcement can happen even inside a country's borders, such as the institutions involved in birth registration (e.
g. hospitals and civil registry offices). Migrant women are therefore controlled through their reproductive lives, as migration enforcement is happening in the birth registration process.
Specifically, within the Dominican Republic, children born to Haitian migrant women or Dominican women of Haitian descent are at risk of remaining undocumented and stateless because their births have not been properly registered or they have not been claimed by a second parent with documented Dominican citizenship.
Obstacles to birth registration are thinly veiled attempts to deny citizenship to Haitian migrants and their descendants in the Dominican Republic, while continuing to exploit them as expendable labour force participants.
What it means
The article also calls for rights advocates to push back against these kinds of practices using existing human rights frameworks. It offers the example of an action research project led by the Caribbean Migrants Observatory (OBMICA) and a local NGO which used research findings to engage in legal accompaniment and policy advocacy to promote birth registration for previously unregistered children of mixed Dominican-Haitian couples.
This research is useful for stakeholders (including groups like UNICEF and UNHCR) working on the implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 16.9 (to provide legal identity and documentation for all, including birth registration) may benefit from awareness of the practices outlined in this research paper.
Suggested next steps
Practitioners working to strengthen birth registration as part of efforts to implement SDG 16
Practitioners can advocate for and implement firewalls or prohibitions against information sharing between health personnel or other service providers and migration enforcement
Dominican Republic
Dominican Republic
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