statelessness had not yet been investigated, whether by academics, policymakers, lawyers, or other experts. I was thus trying to establish whether statelessness existed, why it existed if it did (through which procedures or processes), where it existed (specific islands), and what ethnic groups were affected. I therefore conducted the 2009 interviews under the condition of anonymity for the study participants because I wanted them to speak as freely, and provide as much information as they could, on questions surrounding citizenship, discrimination, and national identity, given these subjects’ sensitive nature in the country.
I conducted sixteen anonymous interviews in 2009.41 Fourteen of these took place in the capital, Nassau, while the remaining two were conducted via telephone. Participants included former and current government officials, academics, community leaders, lawyers, a civil servant, a journalist, an amateur film documentarian, and a graduate student who had worked in the local Haitian communities. None of those interviewed were stateless or at risk of statelessness, but two were Haitian and held prominent positions in the Haitian community. Due to lack of data on statelessness in The Bahamas, I purposely selected the majority of the participants because they held (or had held) leadership positions in the foreign affairs or immigration sectors of government or the nascent human rights community, or were experts on Bahamian migration or nationality law and data collection.
I returned to The Bahamas in the fall of 2012 to carry out a second wave of interviews. I interviewed thirteen individuals in Nassau and seven in Marsh Harbour, Abaco. Participants included lawyers, activists, elected and appointed officials, educators, businesspersons, healthcare professionals, a police and a defense force officer, as well as the Haitian ambassador and Bahamian-born students of Haitian descent from the College of The Bahamas (COB).42 An official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs provided the Ministry’s perspective via email. Of the twenty-one persons interviewed in 2012, eight had either faced the risk of statelessness or were stateless at some point.43 As in the 2009 study, I performed purposeful sampling, but limited such sampling to government officials and lawyers. I obtained interviews with the other participants via snowball sampling or because I came into contact with them at a public forum on statelessness44 at COB and requested interviews from them.
Those who participated in the 2012 portion of the study reflected a broad set of opinions: from those affected by statelessness and those affected by the presence of Bahamian-born individuals of Haitian descent in their communities, to those who held leadership positions in diverse professions that come into contact with individuals of Haitian descent (such as the armed forces, the police, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, health professionals, lawyers, and teachers). In total, I interviewed thirty-seven individuals for the Bahamian case study. Of these, twenty-three were Bahamian of non-Haitian descent, seven were registered or naturalized Bahamians,45 six were foreign residents (American or Haitian), and the remaining person was born in The Bahamas of Haitian descent who had not yet applied to register as a Bahamian. The majority of the interviewees were black (twenty-seven) and male (twenty-four).
In addition to the thirty-seven interviews from The Bahamas, I traveled to the Dominican Republic in the summer of 2012 and the spring of 2013. I interviewed ten individuals in the capital, Santo Domingo, and five in the batey46 of El Caño in the province of Monte Plata. Four of the five participants from the batey were stateless, while one had previously been in that situation but now had her documents to prove Dominican citizenship. The interviewees from Santo Domingo consisted of two UN officials, nongovernmental organization (NGO) activists, lawyers, a diplomat from the Haitian Embassy, academics, as well as the local representative of the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI). Of the fifteen interviewees, six were Dominican (one had previously been stateless), five were foreign residents, and four were presently stateless or unable to prove Dominican nationality. The majority of the interviewees were black47 (ten) and female (ten).
Participants for this part of the fieldwork once again reflect diverse viewpoints on the effects, and existence, of statelessness in the country. As in the Bahamian 2009 portion of the study, I selected the majority of the interviewees from Santo Domingo via purposeful sampling, although a few individuals were contacted via the snowball technique. I did not purposefully select the participants from El Caño, however. I was part of a group that went to listen to a town hall meeting on nationality deprivation in that batey and I consequently ended up informally interviewing five of the attendees (all women). Two additional interviews were conducted in New York City with two other members of OSJI earlier in 2012 on the subject of statelessness in the Caribbean.
In all cases, with the exception of the email interview response from the Bahamian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I recorded and transcribed the interviews. Since I am interested in the participants’ experiences with, and knowledge of statelessness, noncitizen rights, and state membership practices, the interviews were semistructured. I did not constrain our conversations solely to the interview questions that I had, but was open to the interviewee leading the dialogue in other directions. This often allowed me to discover information that I had not originally thought was important or pointed me to new directions of inquiry. The semistructured interview approach therefore allowed me to collect a series of responses to common questions, but also added a richness to the narratives that I perhaps would not have been able to capture otherwise. Such an approach, I believe, is appropriate for examining the lived realities of exclusionary state membership practices and their effects upon people’s sense of belonging and ability to access rights in practice.
Besides the fifty-five semistructured interviews, I engaged in participant observation in a number of settings in the Caribbean and the United States as a means of assessing how individuals engage with each other on questions surrounding statelessness, migration, and human rights. In 2009, I attended the Second Annual Youth Conclave, sponsored by the United Haitian Association of The Bahamas, which addressed problems of discrimination and ways to empower the Haitian-descended youth in the country. Many of the young people present had faced obstacles growing up in The Bahamas and felt ostracized.
In 2012, I attended a coyuntura (town hall meeting) on the effects of Dominican migration law at the Centro Bonó48 in Santo Domingo where members of the public, Dominican lawyers, and migration experts from the International Organization for Migration discussed the effects of Dominican migration law upon persons of Haitian descent. I also witnessed an impromptu celebration at the Centro Bonó when a group of Dominicans of Haitian descent, deprived of their citizenship documents, came to the organization to thank it for the legal assistance it had provided to them. Also in 2012, I attended an event commemorating the life and work of Dominican activist Sonia Pierre49 at Columbia University in New York City, listening to the stories that her children, close friends, and colleagues shared with the audience.
In 2013, I attended a panel discussion on statelessness hosted by the Sociocultural Movement for Haitian Workers (MOSCTHA-USA),50 also at Columbia University, and participated in an invitation-only symposium hosted by the Centro Bonó, the Mesa Nacional para Migrantes y Refugiados (MENAMIRD), the Red de Encuentro Dominico-Haitiano Jacques Viau, and the Observatorio Migrantes del Caribe (OBMICA) in Santo Domingo. Both events focused on the right to a nationality in the Dominican context and included speakers from the Dominican government and civil society.51 I took part in a similar, but public, conference on statelessness at the College of The Bahamas in 201252 and listened via the internet to the follow-up conference that took place in 2014.53 At the invitation of the Norwegian Refugee Council, I was also part of the civil society team that took part in the Caribbean subregional deliberations in Cayman for UNHCR’s Cartagena +30 process, from which a regional Plan of Action for the Americas resulted that includes a chapter on statelessness.54
As a Bahamian, I have spent many hours in The Bahamas informally chatting with “citizens” and “noncitizens” at supermarkets, retail stores, religious venues, and in their homes about Bahamian membership practices, Haitian migrants, and discrimination. I have thus had multiple opportunities to hear diverse viewpoints on citizenship denial and deprivation, the issues associated with statelessness,
