Legal Identity, Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic: From Citizen to Foreigner analyses how thousands of persons of Haitian ancestry recently found themselves needing to re-establish or establish their legal Dominican identity when officials rejected their extant documents or requests to acquire the citizen-confirming papers to which they were entitled. For over 80 previous years, the constitution recognised the right of citizenship to all people born on Dominican territory. Yet many low-income Dominicans, especially those descended from Haitian migrants, never received official proof of their birth in the country. And even for those who had, the official justification for revisiting their citizenship status was that their parents had been ‘in transit’ or residing with irregular migratory status in the Dominican Republic at the time of their birth.

As recently as the mid-2000s roughly 20 per cent of Dominicans possessed no form of documentation whatsoever. Until the twenty-first century, however, many managed to eke out a living and fly under the security radar of the state. Proof of citizenship, increasingly in the form of digital identity documentation, would be required to consolidate one's legal inclusion and gain access to education, health and social-welfare programmes, banking, telephone and other vital services. Prompted by international organisations that simultaneously supported the roll-out of social programmes and legal identity reforms to protect against fraud, a national audit conducted to regularise the citizenship rolls ended up exposing and rendering vulnerable to statelessness many native-born migrant-descendant people, even some who possessed documentation verifying their birth in the country.

Eve Hayes de Kalaf traces the origins and consequences of their plight. Leveraging years of fieldwork and lived experience in the Dominican Republic, Legal Identity, Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic goes well beyond most treatments of the topic in scope and depth. In examining the multiple formal and informal factors and processes that have led to the highly adverse legal limbo or outright exclusion that currently characterises many people's citizenship status, Hayes de Kalaf conveys unparalleled knowledge and appreciation of the complexity of the matter at hand.

The book is organised into a logical and illustrative sequence of chapters that cover: (i) the issue of legal identity as envisioned in the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals; (ii) core struggles in the history of Haitian-descended populations in the Dominican Republic; (iii) the role of international organisations like the World Bank in including the excluded in social programmes while exposing them to an ‘administrative (re)ordering’ of their citizenship status; (iv) a timeline of legal, political and bureaucratic developments that put at risk or terminated the Dominican citizenship of many Dominico-Haitians; and (v) the testimonies of several categories of persons (documented and undocumented; Haitian-descended and other) to Dominican government agencies responsible for determining legal identity. The book concludes by generalising from the Dominican case, sounding a strong cautionary note about the potentially exclusionary consequences for marginalised (especially minoritised) populations of rolling out digital identity initiatives elsewhere. While recognising the right of sovereign states to regularise citizenship rolls and issue formal identification documentation, Hayes de Kalaf is quick to add that the integrity of these processes depends on the fairness of more fundamental decisions concerning who is a citizen.

The book's most important contributions originate from extensive fieldwork conducted in the Dominican Republic. The range of actors the author interviewed and the agencies she visited generate observations and insights that make the book a uniquely informative and interesting source. Her interlocutors included World Bank officials, social-programme administrators, public-health workers, civil registrars, NGO activists, and ordinary people. From a bank official, we come to appreciate the tension between international organisations extending social programmes that call for better identification practices and not treading on sensitive political matters considered the state's sovereign prerogative. From the author's discussions with NGO activists and political figures, we learn how political machinations have informed government decisions about who is considered Dominican. From her conversations with ordinary people struggling to navigate the bureaucracy and emerge with documentary proof of their citizenship, we bear witness to the arbitrariness and discrimination experienced in the treatment of Haitian-descended populations in civil registries across the Dominican Republic. Accounts extend to family members entering the re-registration process from the same starting position and ending up with vastly divergent results, ranging from success in officially establishing/restoring Dominican citizenship to becoming stateless. At a time when dissertation writers spend less and less time conducting fieldwork, the value of knowing one's country case inside and out is on prominent display in this book. Hayes de Kalaf is to be commended for leaving no stone unturned in her research journey.

One question we are left with concerns what to do with highly marginalised, undocumented people who cannot prove that they are legitimate, long-standing citizens of a country and not more recent irregular migrants. Even granting that some identity-based social policies ultimately generate more exclusion than inclusion, and that the development sector must become more sensitive to distortions that formal identification practices can produce, it is unclear what realistic alternatives to sometimes hard decisions exist. Although there may well be no satisfying answers, I would like to have seen the author venture out more on this matter.

Notwithstanding this one remaining question, Legal Identity, Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic is an impressive book, one that I would recommend highly to a range of readers: scholars of the Dominican Republic; students of race in the Americas; academic followers of identification practices and their promises and pitfalls; and practitioners and proponents of high-technology identification responses to fundamental decisions about who belongs to the national community in the full legal, political and bureaucratic sense of the concept. Indeed, Legal Identity, Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic represents a major accomplishment by a talented young scholar.