New Influx of Haitians, but Not Who Was Expected

Miami

Last year after the earthquake in Haiti, Alberto M. Carvalho, superintendent of the Miami-Dade schools — the fourth-biggest district in the nation, with 345,000 students — expected to enroll thousands and thousands of survivors arriving from the devastated country.

He was wrong. A year later, his district has 1,403 survivors — the highest number in the nation, but far below what he predicted.

He expected most to be poor; Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. “I thought they’d need a lot of government services,” he said. The district made plans to convert an old Baptist hospital in Homestead to a school for 125 survivors, who would also be sheltered there.

Wrong again. The arriving Haitians did not need the old hospital. “They were a higher social status,” Mr. Carvalho said. “Definitely middle and upper-middle class.”

Many were like Nicolas Villedrouin, Carl Frederick Janvier and Zahry and Nakim Edmond, survivors who are now classmates at Felix Varela High School here. Nicolas’s father owns an engineering company in Haiti with 300 employees. Zahry and Nakim’s father owns a pharmaceutical company. Carl’s father is a dentist, his mother a doctor.

The superintendent was surprised where the quake survivors showed up, too. He expected a big influx at Edison High, a high-poverty, inner-city school that for years had the district’s biggest Haitian population.

Only six survivors enrolled at Edison. But at Varela High in the prosperous suburb of West Kendall, 51 enrolled, the second-largest number among Dade schools. Many at Varela had attended Lycée Français or Union School, Haiti’s elite prep schools. “We all knew each other; we’d all go to the same parties,” said Kevin Lassegue, a junior. “After the earthquake, we stayed in touch through Facebook and figured out where to go in Miami.”

The principal at Varela High, Connie Navarro, figured the new arrivals would be shell-shocked — in ways that even they might not fully understand yet — and had extra counselors in place to help. She did not expect that she would have to add an Advanced Placement course to accommodate them. Nor did she expect that three quake survivors — Nicolas Etienne, Hans Hillel Rousseau and Zahry Edmond — would be top-ranked tennis players in Haiti and lead Varela High’s team to its first-ever regional playoff.

Indeed, Zahry hopes to play at Fairleigh Dickinson University next fall. “I went to a college showcase, and they asked me to apply,” he said.

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According to the latest data from the Customs and Border Protection agency, in the nine months after the earthquake, 8,989 Haitians came to the United States, about the same number who arrive in a year with no earthquake. Most, 6,956, landed in Miami. New York was second with 1,135. Nationwide, the Haitian-American population is 535,000 — 47 percent in Florida, 27 percent in New York.

Three days after the earthquake last Jan. 12, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, made the Obama administration’s policy clear: the United States would be generous about sending aid to Haiti, but any quake survivor trying to enter the United States without proper documents would be sent back.

To enforce the policy, Coast Guard cutters patrolled the waters off Haiti. In August, two overloaded sailboats with 323 Haitians were intercepted and the people repatriated.

The American response was a startling reminder of how much has changed since the Sept. 11 attacks. In 1980, under another Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, during a six-week period known as the Mariel boatlift, 100,000 Cubans were welcomed to the United States with open arms. They so overran Miami that there was no place to shelter everyone. I was living in Miami at the time, and I will never forget interviewing families sent to live under the stands in the Orange Bowl.

“The policy now is not to open the floodgates,” said Jocelyn McCalla, a former director of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights.

Carline Faustin, who works in Haitian affairs for the Miami-Dade schools, said it made sense that the survivors here were middle or upper class. “They’re the ones who can afford the visas, the paperwork, the flights back and forth to establish U.S. residency,” Ms. Faustin said.

In the 1980s and 1990s, large numbers of the Haitian arrivals were poor boat people, many of them illegal immigrants. They made a beeline to the few places they had heard of here, including Edison High in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood.

This time, North Miami High had the most quake survivors, 88 students, mainly from Haiti’s middle class. North Miami is the first step up for Haitians here when they can afford to leave the inner city. The North Miami principal, Michael Lewis, a Haitian-American himself, randomly picked 10 of the recently arrived for me to interview. Many grew up spending summers in Miami. All had visas. After the quake, eight of them left Haiti by driving across the border to the Dominican Republic and buying a ticket on a commercial airline heading to the United States.

All 20 interviewed at North Miami and Varela said the work at their private schools in Haiti was harder than schoolwork here. Nicolas Villedrouin, who attended Union, where tuition is $9,000 a year, has taken A.P. classes here in biology, calculus and French. The 10 Varela students interviewed are all trilingual, speaking French, Creole and unaccented English. A.P. French is the class the principal added to accommodate their advanced language skills.

Many lived far from Port-au-Prince, on a mountainside full of gated homes. Several described growing up with maids and gardeners, bodyguards and drivers.

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Haiti is a country of huge disparities in wealth, breeding a staggering crime rate and gang violence. When Kevin Lassegue was asked if the earthquake had traumatized him, he answered, “I’m used to being traumatized.”

Of the 20 students interviewed, 17 said someone in their immediate family had been kidnapped or were targets of attempted kidnappings. Usually a ransom was paid and they got their mother or father back in a few days.

But not always. Nicolas’s grandfather was shot dead in an attempted kidnapping.

Kevin, whose mother was returned after two days, said, “They always have a gun.”

While the schools provided extra counseling, all 10 at Varela said they had used the counselors to find the right classes, not to discuss feelings. “I don’t really talk about it,” Carl Pierre Louis said. “I was raised, whatever happens, happens.”

Carl’s father died in the earthquake. In November, one of his brothers was shot to death in Haiti. “Nothing can help my brother come back,” he said. “Nothing can help my father come back.”

Ms. Faustin, the Haitian affairs worker, says there is no tradition of therapy in the Haitian culture, which may explain the students’ reluctance to open up.

“I don’t talk much about my feelings,” said Hans Hillel Rousseau, whose grandmother died in the quake. “I’m mostly over it.”

Still, when the air-conditioner rumbles on at school, or he’s on the second floor of a parking garage and feels a vibration, he startles and wonders, Could it be?

“If someone closes a door hard nearby, I panic a little bit from loud noise,” he said. “I still get afraid.”

For a long time after the quake, he slept with a glass of water beside his bed. That way if he woke in a panic in the middle of the night, he could look at the glass, and if the water wasn’t sloshing around, he knew it was just a bad dream and he could go back to sleep.