Dominican Republic Building Over 100 Miles of Border Wall to Stop Illegal Immigration from Haiti

The Dominican Republic is building a 13-foot-high border wall — set to be the second-longest border wall in the Americas — in the hopes of ending waves of illegal immigration from Haiti.

The government of the Dominican Republic began building the border wall in February to put a halt to illegal immigration from Haiti, which citizens have said is overwhelming their small communities, depressing wages, and undercutting their quality of life.

The concrete and steel wall, when finished, will stand 13 feet tall, and stretch just over 100 miles. The only other existing border wall in the Americas that is longer is the United States-Mexico border wall.

One citizen of the Dominican Republic told Bloomberg that he is tired of Haitians overwhelming his small hometown and leaving trash along the streets:

Riverón, a burly, graying man of 50, describes his town, Dajabón, as a flash point of the immigration debate that’s raging in societies across the globe — in Poland, Hungary, Chile, the US — after the pandemic sank hundreds of millions of people deeper into poverty in developing countries. Riverón knows that his tiny town wouldn’t exist without the cross-border trade with Haiti and yet, in language that borrows from the playbook of Donald Trump and Viktor Orban, he says everything is spinning out of control now. Haitians fleeing the poorest country in the Americas — one beset by the world’s worst levels of food insecurity, an all-but failed government and land made infertile by deforestation and climate change — are, as he sees it, overwhelming local hospitals, strewing garbage on the street and depressing the wages earned by Dominicans. [Emphasis added]

“There are simply too many Haitians here,” he said on a recent afternoon. “I don’t want to use the word ‘invaded,’ but there are parts of this town that have been completely saturated.” [Emphasis added]

The Dominican Republic’s border wall with Haiti comes as a multitude of foreign countries have taken new steps to preserve their national sovereignty. In August, Greek officials announced they would lengthen their border wall with Turkey, and in 2019, France built a similar border wall to keep migrants from rushing into Britain.

Border wall projects around the world are set against the backdrop of President Joe Biden halting all construction of a border wall along the United States-Mexico border — vowing before he was elected that “there will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration.”

In July, though, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) began closing up particular holes in the border wall, specifically in the Yuma, Arizona region. Most of the nearly 2,000-mile-long southern border remains without any barrier at all.

Since Biden took office, roughly 2.2 million border crossers and illegal aliens have entered American communities via the southern border. About 1.35 million of those were briefly apprehended and quickly released into the U.S. interior by Biden’s DHS.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.