Government might extend Program of voluntary return

SANTO DOMINGO. The director general of Migration, Ruben Dario Paulino Sem, reported yesterday that there exists the possibility of extending the 15 day deadline so that the illegal foreigners in the country can be covered by the Voluntary Return Plan.

The program ends today and, starting tomorrow, the authorities will begin to a evaluate their results. "The idea is to see the results of the process, to know how many have gone, and so forth", indicated Paulino Sem.

Questioned regarding a possible extension of the time of the program, he answered: "Yes, there exists this possibility, but it will depend on the results which we get after doing the evaluation."

Until last week, some 31,275 persons of Haitian nationality had returned voluntarily to their country. Of this number, a few more than 1000 did it under the facilities offered by the program which includes transportation by bus and trucks to transfer their belongings. Those who accept the program are also not subject to the sanctions established in the Migration Law, so that they can return to the country later on, as long as they comply with the legal requirements.

For today, the Ministry of Interior and Police has programmed an activity for the first delivery of the ID cards to foreigners registered in the National Plan of Normalization who have completed their paperwork.

The activity will start at 3:00 in the afternoon in the Activity Hall of the Ministry, located on Mexico Avenue according to Samir Santos, the director of the Plan.

In this first activity, they will issue around 200 ID cards to persons registered in the National District, and during the week they will report regarding the other provinces or jurisdictions in which they will continue issuing the cards. For this, explains Santos, they will contact the persons by telephone in order to advise them to come by to pick up the new document.

According to Santos, so far there are some 50,000 cases that are ready, of the 288,000 which registered in the Normalization Plan. Regarding the cases that are pending, Santos said that they are advancing and they expect to complete the great majority of the files before the end of the 45 day period that the government gave in order for those registered to deliver the missing documents. This time period began last 18 June.

"We have advanced a lot, and each office receives between 200 and 300 persons who come in to supply documents, so that we are advancing as we have planned and we expect that when the 45 days are up, we will have issued all or nearly all of the ID cards."

They continue to issue cards to cane workers

The director of Migration reported that today they will continue with the process of issuing identification cards to the Haitian nationals who work in the sugar fields of the Dominican Republic.

Ruben Dario Paulino Sem explained, nevertheless that the delivery process would include only the cane workers that are registered in the Ministry of Hacienda. So far they have delivered 611 permanent resident cards to cane workers according to his statement.

It is estimated that some 2700 sugar cane workers will receive their ID cards which will normalize their immigration status in the country.

Tania Molina