Date of Graduation

2026

Degree Type

Dissertation/Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Advisor(s)

Helen Rabello-Kras

Abstract

In the past decade, Haitian migration has become central to Dominican political discourse. This shift is particularly evident under President Luis Abinader’s administration, which has overseen a sharp increase in restrictive border enforcement and citizenship measures targeting Haitian migrants fleeing escalating humanitarian crises. While existing scholarship on Dominican nationalism highlights the historical role of antihaitianismo in shaping exclusionary state practices, less attention has been paid to how contemporary elite rhetoric reproduces these dynamics in more indirect, coded ways. Drawing on theories of symbolic politics and securitization, this study examines how state discourse constructs Haitian migrants within national narratives. It asks: (1) What types of rhetoric appear most frequently in President Abinader’s speeches and the General Directorate of Migration (GDM) articles? and (2) What rhetorical frameworks are most prevalent when Haitian migrants are referenced? To answer these questions, I conduct a manual content analysis of a randomized sample of 10 presidential speeches and 25 General Directorate of Migration articles published between 2022 and 2026, using an original keyword-based codebook that categorizes rhetoric into nationalist, security, positive/neutral, and negative language towards migrants. This study finds that security rhetoric dominates across both sources, while nationalist rhetoric is especially prominent in presidential speeches. It also finds that references to Haiti and Haitian migrants are significantly associated with security framing but not with explicitly negative rhetoric. These results provide novel evidence for the argument that exclusionary nationalism is reproduced through implicit securitization rather than overt hostility, paving the way for future research to better capture how coded and institutionalized forms of political rhetoric sustain racialized exclusion in contemporary migration debates.

Download

Share

COinS