This chapter examines life along the border from the era of the American Occupation through the rise of the Trujillo regime in 1930. It reconstructs the period from the testimonies of ethnic Haitian detainees. Analysis of court and police records from the period demonstrate a stark difference between enforcement in the decades of the 1920s and the 1930s. The year 1930 was a watershed. In 1930 Dominican-born ethnic Haitians were first systematically deported to Haiti and forced to pay for immigration permits. Executive Order 372, a racialized migration law introduced during the US occupation, played a crucial role in the process by which all ethnic Haitians became classified as foreigners. Through the evolving use of this law, ethnic Haitians who had previously been recognized as citizens, property owners and legal residents in Dominican territory were deported to Haiti. Others remained in Dominican territory, but in 1930, for the first time, people born on Dominican territory were reclassified as foreigners and they were forced to pay immigration tax. Far from a harmonious, bicultural border, the chapter illuminates the increasingly vulnerable legal status of ethnic Haitians through exploring systematic deportation, imprisonment, punitive taxation, lost citizenship, lost property, and displacement prior to the genocide.

This chapter considers the relationship between the Protocol and issues of identity. Brexit, in some accounts, does not change the 1998 Agreement’s citizenship provisions. The people of Northern Ireland remain able ‘to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose’. It does not alter the obligation on the UK government to maintain rigorous impartiality between these identities in Northern Ireland’s governance. On a deeper level, however, questions of identity in Northern Ireland are central to the idea of Brexit and have profoundly shaped the reality of Brexit.

This chapter considers the relationship between the Protocol and issues of identity. Brexit, in some accounts, does not change the 1998 Agreement’s citizenship provisions. The people of Northern Ireland remain able ‘to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose’. It does not alter the obligation on the UK government to maintain rigorous impartiality between these identities in Northern Ireland’s governance. On a deeper level, however, questions of identity in Northern Ireland are central to the idea of Brexit and have profoundly shaped the reality of Brexit.

The Good Friday/Belfast Agreement had to address a fissure in constitutional thought on the island of Ireland; was the legitimacy of the island’s constitutional arrangements dependent upon one group of constituent power holders, or two? The question had been contested since partition, and this contribution explores how the conundrum was tackled through John Hume’s concept of a people of Northern Ireland, who would have the ability to determine whether to remain within the UK or join a unified Ireland. This concept might have sufficed during the 1998 negotiations, but it remained all-but-unexplored in the years after, until the aftermath of the June 2016 Brexit referendum. Brexit changed the debate on the (re)unification of Ireland, and this contribution examines three facets of this shift. First, it necessitates a new understanding of this group of constituent power holders. Second, to reflect the 1998 Agreement, the people of Northern Ireland also gained special protections in the UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement. Third, alongside these developments, the UK Government’s application of immigration rules and ascription of nationality to the people of Northern Ireland called the nature of this status into question. This article considers how these factors are shaping contemporary debate over Northern Ireland’s constitutional future.