The Dominican-Haitian relations has been complicated due to the history of both countries.

In 1801, Haiti gained its independence from France after a slave revolt that, among other things, received plenty of aid and support from the Dominicans on the Spanish side of the island. Then on the 1st of Dec of 1821, the Spanish side declared its independence from Spain. At that moment the belief was that the island can survive with Haitians with their French/African based culture on one side and Dominicans with their Spanish/African/Taino based culture on the other.

Despite the help the Dominicans offered to the Haitians during their independence, on the 9th of February of 1822, the Haitian army marched into the Dominican side of the island, violating its sovereignty and occupied the Dominicans for the next 22 years. The Haitian Occupation is considered to be the darkest period in Dominican history due to the many things the Haitian government did to the Dominicans ranging from closing the universities, confiscating the properties of the Catholic Church and rupturing the connection with the Vatican, the Haitians encouraged many Dominicans to leave the island and many emigrated to Puerto Rico, Cuba and Venezuela; the Haitians prohibited the use of Spanish, taxed the Dominicans to pay the debt they owed to France as reparations for economic loses during the Haitian Revolution, and a very long and complicated etc.

After two decades of abuses and attempt to culturally cleanse the island of all things Dominican, the Dominicans took advantage of a political turmoil that was boiling in Port-Au-Prince and on the 27th of February of 1844 the Dominicans regained their independence and named their new country the Dominican Republic. The Haitian government reacted by attempting to annex the Dominican Republic, because without the Dominican tax base they were not able to successfully pay the debt they owed to France. Also, many Haitian military generals had acquired much property on the Dominican side which were instantly lost upon the Dominican independence, and that also motivated the Haitians to invade and control the Dominicans.

Some of the invasions were extremely brutal including the massacre of entire Dominican towns and villages as the Haitian troops passed through them. In fact, Haitian emperor Faustin Soulouque prior to attempting an invasion attempt of the Dominican Republic that if he succeeds, not even the chickens will be left alive in the Dominican Republic. In other words, the Haitians were prepared to create an ethnic cleansing of the Dominican side in order to have the island under their control.

Because of these serious aggression, the Dominican president Pedro Santana reached an agreement with the government of Spain to have the Dominican Republic become a part of Spain once again, and in 1859 the Dominican Republic became a province of Spain. With Spain in control and the Spanish army on the island, the Haitian desire to control the island put to an end. In fact, the Haitians felt uncomfortable having a powerful European presence on the island, so the Haitians offered help to the Dominicans when a small nationalist group revolted ending with the War of Restoration and in 1863 the Spanish army departed and the Dominican Republic was restored. This didn’t ended the rivalry due to disputes regarding the border. The Haitians made the claim that the border was further to the east than it currently is, while Dominicans resorted to the Agreement of Aranjuez when the border between the Spanish and French side was agreed and was further to the west, including much of what today is Central Haiti.

Due to this dispute, several skirmishes occurred and at times the relationship deteriorated. In the beginning of the 20th century, American and Cuban capitalists begin to develop the Dominican sugar industry on the eastern plains, but due to a lack of labor supply within the native Dominican population, men from the British Caribbean were initially imported to work the plantations (these were known as Cocolos) and later, when the Cocolos revolted demanding better pay, they switched to using Haitian labor.

The sugarcane workers lived their lives on the plantations in small communities known as Bateyes, completely isolated from the Dominican population. What resulted was small pockets of Haiti in a sea of Dominicans.

In 1930, a man trained by the United States Marines rose to power and installed a dictatorship that lasted until 1961. This man was Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Prior to him rising to power, the Dominican government ordered a survey along the border region (which at the time the border went deep into what today is Central Haiti) and what was found was that Haitians had occupied the entire Guava Valley of the Dominican Republic. As a result of this, the Dominican and Haitian government reached an agreement to give the Guava Valley to Haiti and redesign the border. They also agreed to build the international highway, which was to be a visible marker of where Haiti ended and the Dominican Republic began, and the Haitians were to remain in Haiti and the Dominicans in the Dominican Republic unless either of the two had permission to cross the border.

Once Trujillo’s dictatorship was in place, he went to the border region to see for himself what many Dominicans were already complaining regarding the very large Haitian presence on the Dominican side of the border. What he found was that much of the western region of the Dominican Republic was already filled with Haitians and the economies of those regions were oriented more towards Port-au-Prince and Cap Haitien than to Santo Domingo and Santiago, despite being on Dominican soil and despite the agreement the Haitians and Dominicans signed years before.

Trujillo rejected the notion of giving more land to Haiti, and instead opted for the expulsion of all Haitians living on the western part of the Dominican Republic. In the process, many Dominican military men were provoked by some Haitians that refused to leave, and this resulted in the death of roughly 4,000 Haitians; with the passing of time the numbers have been inflated for unknown reasons, albeit much speculation exist on the matter. This caused an international outcry and Trujillo resolved the situation by paying reparations to the Haitian government which was suppose to pass the money to the survivors of the victims. Of course, not a single survivor saw a penny because Haitian dictator Duvalier embezzled the funds. In any case, the Dominican and Haitian governments were at peace again.

In 1961 Trujillo was killed and that ended his dictatorship, the Dominican Republic fell into a Civil War that ended with American Marines invading the country in 1965. By 1970 the Dominican Republic was a democratic country with a capitalist economic system, under the leadership of Joaquin Balaguer.

In the early 1980s the situation in Haiti reached a boiling point with the economic meltdown and the beginnings of an illegal immigration flow to the economically much better Dominican Republic. This new immigration flow was different from the agreed seasonal sugarcane workers, because the new migrants were in the country illegally and went to the cities where they became much more visible to the Dominican population.

The illegal flow continued through the 1990s and 2000s, with the Dominican migration authorities having serious difficulty in containing the situation. As a result of this, the Dominican Republic is currently a country with a very significant Haitian minority that is very visible nationwide. They have replaced many Dominican workers due to their cheaper wages compared to the Dominicans, and sectors like agriculture and construction depend on a workforce that is over 80% Haitian. In tourism it has been estimated that illegal immigrants from Haiti make up 50% of all workers, and in the informal economy Haitians have dominated many fields such as selling in the streets, begging, etc.

This has created much resentment and xenophobia among the local Dominican population that feels powerless as they see their surroundings being filled with illegal immigrants from Haiti, and the increasing difficulty of finding employment with decent pay in sectors that a mere two decades ago were overwhelmingly Dominican and had wages that allowed for a decent standard of living. Add to this the historical memory of the atrocities the Haitians did to the Dominicans during the Haitian Occupation and the attacks against Dominican sovereignty for many decades after the occupation, plus the complete lack of recognition and asking for forgiveness from the part of the Haitian government for the wrongdoings they committed in the past against the Dominicans; all of this has reignited the old tensions with Dominicans and Haitians now worried about who will stay with Dominican resources.

Some Haitians have attempted to force the Dominicans to accept the ever growing illegal immigrants from Haiti through an elaborate internationally discrediting campaign in which the Dominican Republic and the Dominican people are painted as evil, enslaving, racist people. They often use the incident that occurred under Trujillo during the expulsion of Haitians from the Dominican Republic as an anchor point to create an anti-Dominican feeling, however Dominicans claim that this is an unfair and evil trick on the part of the Haitians.

First, because the pro-Haitians ignore the suffering the Dominicans suffered at the hands of the Haitians in the 1800s, including ethnic cleansing attempts on Dominican soil by the Haitian government; and second, due to the the constant labeling of Dominicans as racist for deporting Haitians, but the Bahamas, Cuba, Jamaica, Turks and Caicos, Martinique, Guadaloupe, St Lucia and every other island in the Caribbean produce mass deportations of Haitians on a yearly basis, and yet there is no international discrediting campaign towards any of those islands, including a very peculiar lack of the racism discourse that is often exclusively reserved for criticizing the Dominican deportation of Haitians.

In a nutshell (what a nutshell, eh?), that’s why the relationship between the Dominicans and the Haitians are the way they currently are.