Report
As the sun rises in a working class neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Bolivian immigrants wait on a street corner for Korean or Argentine textile manufacturers to come and hire them for one or two days work.
Two international human rights bodies—the Inter-American Human Rights Commission and the Inter-American Human Rights Court—are examining charges that the Dominican government is illegally expelling large groups of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent and is using what amounts to racial profiling to select those who will be deported.
Haiti and the Dominican Republic share a single Caribbean island, Hispaniola, but Haitians living in the Dominican Republic—who number at least half a million out of a population of eight million—have been subject to mistreatment and periodic waves of deportation; the most brutal was a 1937 expulsion during which the army and police killed thousands of people.
“This area is full of Peruvians. They are everywhere, these dirty Indians that stand on the street all day. They lean on our shop windows and keep the clients away from our stores. It would be better if they went back to their country and stopped coming to take away our jobs,” comments a salesclerk at a bookstore on central Santiago’s Cathedral Street.
Percy Takayama says that several times recently when he’s approached a Lima newspaper kiosk, people gathered to scan the tabloid headlines have yelled at him that “Japanese should go back to their country!” Others have shouted that the Japanese have robbed the country blind; he recently tried to buy something at a store, only to have the clerk say, “I don’t wait on criminals.”
Over the past decade, one of the more dramatic population developments in the United States has been the burgeoning of the Mexican community all along the eastern seaboard. Population experts predict that within ten years Mexicans will be the largest minority on the east coast—from Florida to New England.
In April 1994 I came to the United States from El Salvador. I came with three other young women and a “coyote”—a border-crossing guide for undocumented migrants. We made the trip from El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, by car, taxi, bus, truck, bicycle and a pedaled cart we called a “tricycle.”