Street‐Level Bureaucrats Manufacturing Migrants: An Implementation Study of Policy Measures to Address Statelessness in the Dominican Republic

ABSTRACT Migration policy implementation studies based on Western European or North American contexts may assume that those affected by a given policy are indeed migrants. In developing country contexts, where undocumented nationals can be indistinguishable from the foreign‐born, implementation enables street‐level bureaucrats to manufacture migrants out of those deemed not to belong through administrative manoeuvres. The Dominican Republic provides a critical instance of how street‐level bureaucrats can make migrants out of people who never crossed an international border, with devastating impacts on their access to social rights. Most scholarship on the case comes from international law and investigates the 2013 Constitutional Court sentence which retroactively stripped citizenship from an estimated 133,770 descendants of Haitian migrants born in country dating back to 1929. Less scholarly attention has examined the implementation of subsequent policy measures adopted by the Dominican state—regularisation for migrants, naturalisation for their descendants. Conceptually, this paper situates itself within critical policy studies, combining insights from the bottom‐up literature on implementation studies in the “Global South” and critical analysis of policy implementation. Drawing on a case study complemented by ethnographic observations, the paper argues that in developing country contexts characterised by “intentional ambiguity” (Frost), policy implementation can perpetuate the very problem the policy purports to address. Intentionally ambiguous implementation can serve as a state strategy for signalling a policy change to the international community, whilst the reality on the ground remains unchanged.