For over a month Dominican consular missions in Haiti (Pétion-ville, Ouanaminthe, Cap Haitien, Belladères and Anse à Pitre) have a lot of delay to issue visas on passports while we are in high season of visa application (early November to Carnival) which causes many problems for travel agencies, which have sometimes had to recover passports by clients for more than 2 weeks, but also in the programming of some binational activities that have been forced to re-program certain activities...

Let's stress that a multiple-year visa, the category most requested by Haitians costs 230 US dollars a very high price compared to a US visa valid for 5 years that costs 160 dollars.

Note that by the end of this year nearly 200,000 people are expected to use one of the land border points to enter Dominican territory, 98% of whom are Haitian nationals, according to projections by the Dominican General Directorate of Immigration.

Despite the fact that visas generate nearly 50 million receipts a year to the Dominican State, nothing is done to improve the speed of service and avoid disrupting the movement of Haitians between the two countries. In addition, no official statement has been issued by the Dominican consular authorities to explain the long delays and apologize with visa applicants...

Remember that all Haitian citizens holding a US, Canadian or Schengen visa (Europe) are not affected by these delays, since they can travel freely in the Dominican Republic by paying only a tourist card of 20 US dollars.

PI/ HaitiLibre