Dominicans in Spain: the paradox of defending someone else's border

They guard your shop but not their own: the Dominican paradox

A group of Dominican citizens has offered to protect Spanish shops from possible attacks and has challenged other communities to do the same, according to a video circulated on social media. The scene has peine an uncomfortable flank: those who promise to defend Spain are the very people being asked why they don't defend their own country's border against mass immigration from Haiti. The paradox is no small matter. The Dominican Republic shares an island with Haiti and is locked in a migration struggle that, by the participants' own admission, remains unresolved.

Shop protection as a social barometer

The gesture has an immediate economic reading. Small neighbourhood shops, many of them run by Latin American families, are the link most exposed to insecurity and the one that receives the least institutional protection. Some argue the offer of protection stems from precisely that: from the absence of a public response, not from a newly discovered national identity. The calculation is cold. Whoever has a business to lose defends the business.

But the conversation quickly shifted to comparative grievance. It is argued that the same communities that demand protection in Spain do not demand it in their countries of origin, and that solidarity with the host country coexists with a questionable tolerance of their own problems. The criticism is not new, but the packaging is: now it comes from those who, on paper, should be on the other side of the counter.

Hispanism as bargaining currency

The figure of the Hispanist Iván Gatón appears in the conversation as a reference point for a movement that champions the bond with the Motherland and that, according to one participant, is gaining ground among Dominicans living in Spain. It is not a mass phenomenon, nor is it free of contradiction: the same tradition that celebrates the Spanish heritage coexists with a school narrative in Latin America that portrays colonisation as plunder. The result is a two-way cynicism that those involved themselves point out.

The demographic calculation nobody wants to look at

The discussion came down to the underlying figure: the native birth rate. It is pointed out that confidence in the future and job stability are preconditions for having children, and that a society that has lost both will hardly reverse the trend. The consequence is mechanical: the population replacement will be carried out by those arriving from outside. And those who arrive from outside, according to this reading, will defend the country that feeds them with more determination than those who inhabit it by default.

There is an irony hanging over the whole affair. Those who promise to defend Spain from insecurity are the same people accused of not defending their own. And those who should defend it, according to the official narrative, have spent years looking the other way. Who protects whom when the state withdraws?