Many people are really misinformed about Haiti. The most common mistake is that people think that Haitians are Jamaican. They assume that we speak English, and they often have never heard of Creole. People also associate Haiti with voodoo and zombies. They don't realize that voodoo is nothing like what they've seen on television or in the movies. Unfortunately, Hollywood sensationalizes life in Haiti, and that makes people fearful. Also, Americans might think that all Haitians came to the U.S. as refugees on rafts. In addition, people don't understand how much we have had to sacrifice to get what we have now.
Before we came to the U.S., we didn't know what to expect. Some people had told us it was bad; some people had told us it was good. It was all so confusing. We hoped that life wouldn't be all that different from what we experienced in Haiti. We thought that America would be like our home, only bigger and better. When we got here, we saw that America was so different from what we had been expecting.
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Number of Haitian immigrants receiving permanent resident status:
1997: 15,053
2006: 22,228