Today, policymakers see Latin America and the Caribbean as a triumph in the global fight against under-registration. Governments have successfully halved the number of undocumented births, helping bring marginalised ‘outsiders’ within the reach of the formal economy and the social safety net (Garay, 2016). As we saw in Chapter 1, the ‘administrative ordering’ (Scott, 1998) of populations through the improvement of civil registries has become a fundamental component of global social policy. Over the past three decades, international actors have incorporated legal identity as a core cross-cutting theme. The region is now on track to achieve the global UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of universal birth registration by 2030.

In this chapter, I illustrate how the World Bank's involvement in sponsoring and enforcing legal identity exacerbated historical tensions over the right of Haitian-descended populations born in the country to a Dominican nationality. Although for years the authorities had informally refused to issue the Haitian-descended with their documents, I show how these problems intensified as efforts to modernise the civil registry and provide a universal legal identity expanded. International organisations, aware of disputes over access to citizenship as well as the sensitivities around questions of race and national belonging on the island, continued to fund and push for the expansion of these citizenship-stripping practices, ultimately dismissing the experiences of populations on the island as a sovereign matter for the Dominican authorities to address.

The Under-Registration of Afro-Descended and Indigenous Populations in the Americas

The international debt crisis of the 1980s had a significant impact on spending power, incomes and unemployment levels. To address the burgeoning crisis, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) renegotiated lending and introduced structural adjustment loans to promote the integration of neoliberal policies in the Americas. The regional governments that accepted these conditions subsequently prioritised deficit reduction over investment in human capital and infrastructure. This lack of social spending created a ‘lost decade’ in development, which had an overly harmful impact on the poor.