Kalaf and Díaz examine how social policy is designed in the Americas and what it does to race, national identity, and belonging. Their focus is the Dominican Republic, where international actors promoted universal legal identity while access to citizenship documents was being restricted, arbitrarily, from people of Haitian descent above all. This book is the first to draw the connection between those two developments.

That pairing exposes a gap in global policy, which has not reckoned with how measures meant to include people can instead push them out, particularly where states already discriminate against populations descended from migrants. As identification systems grow more capable, the authors note, fresh insecurities and uncertainties appear alongside them.

The argument works as a warning about how fast identification practices are spreading, and offers a pointed critique of the international push to give everyone a legal identity ahead of the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals.