Racial Frontiers: Hemispheric Logics of Haitians’ Displacement and Asylum in the Americas

Abstract

While international asylum law includes race as the first protected category—followed by religion, nationality, particular group membership, and political opinion—Haitians’ ongoing racialised persecution and denial of refuge across the Americas reveals the failures of this framework. Drawing on academic literature, documentary evidence, and primary sources, we analyse the racial and neocolonial logics constituting Haitians’ experiences at home and as migrants through the Americas. Focusing on Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico as nodes of migration trajectories, we argue that Haitians confront a “hemispheric frontier regime”. Unlike a single border that impedes passage, this multilayered frontier regime constantly uproots Haitians, even while states evade their responsibilities vis-à-vis asylum seekers. Over time, mutually reinforcing frontier logics of policing, dispossession, extraction, and empire at various scales—urban, domestic, transnational—structure Haitians’ and other migrants’ racialised exclusion from rights regimes across geographies from Haiti to South, Central, and North America.