Refugees, Immigrants, and Education in the Global South

Lives in Motion

Lesley Bartlett, Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher, Lesley Bartlett, Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135080303
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Théorie et pratique de l'éducation

The unprecedented human mobility the world is now experiencing poses new and unparalleled challenges regarding the provision of social and educational services throughout the global South. This volume examines the role played by schooling in immigrant incorporation or exclusion, using case studies of Thailand, India, Nepal, Hong Kong/PRC, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Kenya, Egypt, South Africa, Senegal, Sudan, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. Drawing on key concepts in anthropology, the authors offer timely sociocultural analyses of how governments manage increasing diversity and how immigrants strategize to maximize their educational investments. The findings have significant implications for global efforts to expand educational inclusion and equity.

1 State, Market, Xenophobia

Making Haitian Educational Migrants in the Dominican Republic¹

Kiran Jayaram

INTRODUCTION

Although the phenomenon of young Haitians traveling to study at universities in the Dominican Republic is not new, the first decade of the 21^st century saw an increase in these educational migrants. After depicting the institutional, legal, demographic, and social contexts in which these Haitian university students exist, this chapter will describe understandings and experiences of Haitian students at Dominican universities in Santo Domingo. The chapter focuses on: students' motivation for internationalized higher education; social relations; and financial issues they face as educational migrants, particularly since the 2010 earthquake. The goal of this chapter is to show how Haitian university students in the Dominican Republic manage their educational studies in the context of the pressures of modern capitalism and of a potentially antagonistic national discourse within their host country.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

This chapter draws upon studies of educational migration and the anthropology of the state to frame how Haitian students in the Dominican Republic are received and how they deal with that reception.

Literature on the topic of people migrating to seek education focuses mainly on South-North migration, and mostly on K-12 children and youth. One strand of the educational migration literature deals with factors affecting students' performance (see introduction to volume); language of instruction, dynamics between ethnic groups, and acceptance of cultural difference figure prominently. Remittances have also been observed to play a major role in student success in the home country (Bredl, 2011; see also Fresnoza-Flot, Oliveira, this volume). Another strand of the literature has dealt with the so-called brain drain (Rao, 2010, p. 137). This almost econometric approach to complex phenomena ignores some social aspects, although authors have begun to compensate for this gap. Suárez-Orozco (2001) discussed the issues affecting self-making and identity in a capitalist job market where certain skills are prized. Ong (2006) describes how students from Southeast Asia migrate to U.S. universities to acquire marketable skills with which to return home, a trend she finds creates a “collision course with the situated values of political liberalism” (p. 140). Waters' (2006) work on why students from Hong Kong study in Canada showed that middle-class families preferred to have children study in foreign universities both to add cultural capital through internationalization, and also simply to continue studies beyond secondary schooling, as doing so in their home country would have been difficult. Finally, Pyvis and Chapman (2007) discussed both local Malay and international students at an off shore Australian university and their ideas about using education to access an international job market and to develop a more global, less “provincial” identity. With these approaches, attention can be given to motivations of students, creation of new subjectivities, and the impact of the contemporary political economy on students' lives, although not as if occurring in a sociopolitical vacuum.

International migration, no matter to what end, requires some discussion of governance of interstate boundaries, for which anthropological treatments of the state are appropriate. To begin, I draw upon the growing literature in political anthropology, which recognizes the state, not as a given, but as a particular constellation of “ideological and material aspects of state construction” that differentially affects “operation and diffusion of power throughout society” (Sharma & Gupta, 2006, p. 8). This expands governance beyond the traditional notion of simply elected officials to include ideas, policies, agents, and public agencies (like a state university). Aihwa Ong's (1996) exploration of citizenship began by rightfully exploding the so-called common sense assumption that states grant citizenship evenly. Her work explains how states align themselves through policy and practice along lines of contemporary capitalism (or neoliberalism, in her parlance). This effectively includes some people (as being desirable) while excluding others (even though they may be, to paraphrase Wooding & Moseley-Williams [2004], needed economically but not wanted socially). Specifically, this leads to an examination of processes whereby people both construct themselves by “technologies of subjectivity” and are constructed by power regimes by “technologies of subjection” (Ong, 2006, p. 6). These latter, in part, regulate people as citizens legally through policies and policing entities and constitute a particular regime of govern-mentality. However, the former technologies are the quotidian processes that “induce self-animation and self-government so that citizens can optimize choices, efficiency, and competitiveness in turbulent market conditions” and thus “are made into subjects of a particular nation-state” (Ong, 2006, p. 6; Ong, 1996, p. 737). This means that the constellation of policies and actors will strive to shape people's behavior for the presumed common good, and people may attempt to act in accordance with similar goals. In other words, a utilitarian measure is applied whereby a regime can (endeavor to) govern more efficiently as long as people (endeavor to) follow policies and practices aligned with the goals of the state, which in the case at hand, are linked to the imperatives of modern capitalism. Although Ong (1999) highlights flexible citizenship, or the transnational practices a person uses to efficiently respond to market conditions while crossing national boundaries, as one such self-making strategy, other practices reflect the idea of cultural citizenship, whereby “subordinated or marginalized groups define and experience their humiliation and their striving for well-being, respect, and dignity” (Rosaldo, 1997, p. 7). In other words, anthropologists of the state consider how people engage with the sociopolitical entities that shape their lives.

This framework allows for discussion of the present case that shows how Haitian educational migrants conform and adapt to the political economic and social context of contemporary Dominican Republic.

METHODS

This chapter draws upon my larger research project that examines the economic, political, social, and personal survival strategies of various classes of Haitian migrants to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Using anthropological methods over two years (2008–2010), I conducted interviews with over 200 Haitians. I conducted extensive participant-observation, surveys, and interviews in “Benito,” a neighborhood where a large number of working poor Haitians live and work. In addition, I used personal networks to recruit business elite, professionals, and university students for interviews and surveys. This chapter draws on structured and semi-structured interviews I conducted with 37 students at various institutions of higher learning in Santo Domingo. Data from structured interviews were coded by themes; the major ones are presented later in the tables.

Of the 37 participants in my study, all were single undergraduates with no children. Those that admitted to having boyfriends and girlfriends identified them all as being Haitian. There were 23 men and 14 women. All but 5 students hailed from outside Port-au-Prince, and the overwhelming majority lived in either Herrerra or Las Americas, two neighborhoods to the east and west of the Distrito Nacional. The majority of the students were studying at Universidad Tecnológica de Santiago (UTESA, 21), the technology-focused university, with the remainder from Universidad Iberoamerica (UNIBE, 5), Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (PUCMM, 4), Universidad Adventista (UNAD, 2), Centro de Tecnología Universal (CENTU, 2), Instituto Superior de Agricultura (ISA, 1), Universidad Católica de Santo Domingo (UCSD, 1), and Universidad Dominicana O & M (1). Although UNIBE students are overrepresented in this sample (13% sampled versus less than 1% of the overall total of Haitian students in the Dominican Republic, according to D'Oleo Ramírez, 2008), the two schools with the most Haitians enrolled (65% of all students) correspond with the top two schools represented in the sample (67%, D'Oleo Ramírez, 2008). Thirty-three had parents who paid for their schooling, three had other family relations (including godparents) who supported their studies, and one worked to pay for school; these statistics mirror approximate ratios seen in other studies.² All held Haitian passports. Twenty-four had student visas, 9 had tourist visas, and 4 had permanent Dominican residency at the time of the interview. The relevance of student status is revealed in the next section.

CONTEXT

An understanding of the dispositions and strategies of Haitian university students in the Dominican Republic requires examining the post-secondary institutional context of both countries, the legal structures pertaining to migration, and the demographic and social dynamics of educational migrants.

University education in Haiti mirrors the situation of primary and secondary schooling, in that the most prestigious schools are private, followed by some good quality public schools, with a growing number of private institutions of varying quality. Although many buildings were destroyed or damaged during the January 2010 earthquake, operations had generally returned to their previous levels as of mid-2011. Access to the universities is made difficult by their rigorous entrance exams and their low capacity to absorb secondary school graduates. It is estimated that approximately 60,000 students graduate from secondary school each year, but there are approximately 15,000 spaces available at all Haitian institutions (Guy Alexandre, personal communication, July 22, 2011), meaning that 75% of those students could not enter a program in Haiti, even if they had the ways and means to do so.

For these reasons and others, many Haitians seek higher education outside the country. Given its proximity and relatively easy access, many Haitians elect to pursue post-secondary education in the Dominican Republic, credentials that are readily accepted in Haiti. There is no official number of Haitian students in the Dominican Republic. News reports from 2008–2010 give a range of 5,000 to 27,000 students; the former Minister of Haitians Living Abroad estimated that 15,000 Haitians are studying at Dominican universities (Edwin Paraíson, personal communication, December 16, 2007). Statistics are incomplete at best, and if private universities keep statistics disaggregated by nationality, they do not make them public, so exact numbers cannot be given. In his study, D'Oleo Ramírez (2008) found that the majority of the Haitian students were at UTESA, a technology-focused university. Further, the top four courses of study among the Haitian students are medicine, administration, computer science, and hotel management and tourism, a trend that my data reflect.

Notably, Dominican universities require no significant entrance exams, although almost all require students to take a placement exam. Once migrants have produced the required state-based documents, university paperwork, and associated fees, they may enroll at almost any institution of their choice. From this point of view, it is much easier to gain entry to a variety of institutions, according to one's interest, than it is in Haiti, provided one can afford the tuition. Further, although the state universities of both countries offer education within a more liberal tradition, and whereas there are more offerings at different levels in the Dominican Republic, many of the private institutions in both countries foster a market-based orientation to higher education.

As Haitian educational migrants are crossing an international border, national laws from both countries seek to regulate their presence within and beyond international boundaries. Officially, national legal codes require Haitians leaving the country to have an official passport and any required visa to leave the country, and any foreigner entering the Dominican Republic is required to have a valid passport (DGM, 2004, Artículo 78). Although specific visa requirements vary by country, Haitians are required to have some sort of visa. Exceptions to this may include: travel across an open border on market days, travel during emergencies (like after the 2010 earthquake), undocumented crossing due to bribery, or crossing at a location with no immigration officials present.

Legal entry into the Dominican Republic is regulated by a series of laws. Currently, those Haitians who seek a student visa are subject to four provisions. First, Article 3, Paragraph VIII of Law 875 from 1978 provides that a student visa is for multiple-entries during one year. Article 36 of Law 285–04 defines those who come to formally study at an officially recognized institution as “non-residents.” The recent rules on how to apply migration Law 285–04 explains the requirements for obtaining such a visa, which include having a passport, a letter of acceptance from the educational institution, approved medical insurance, and proof of economic solvency. Finally, applicants for student visas are...