Ten months of fieldwork anchor this study, carried out in a batey, one of the milling settlements attached to Dominican sugarcane estates where workers and their families live. Fifty-five residents sat for hour-long interviews in Spanish or Haitian Creole, alongside fifteen key informants, a focus group, a household census and standardised depression and anxiety measures. From that material Childers builds the idea of liminal legality, a status that shifts as policy shifts and sits between documented and undocumented, produced by a state that recruited Haitian labour and then invalidated the birth certificates issued on the strength of work identification cards. Racial profiling does the sorting: French-derived surnames, dark skin and accented speech mark people for suspended papers, blocked school examinations and unregistered hospital births. She reads the 2010 constitution and the Book of Foreigners as devices that secure a workforce while withholding membership, records the Yean and Bosico ruling and the nationalist backlash it drew, and turns the case back on immigration policing elsewhere.