If the 'White' is for me, who can be against me? And Haiti, in all of this!

A young woman was arrested in New York. I know her. She came from the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, still carried in her voice the gentle discipline of their lessons and that stubborn innocence that believes life is fairer elsewhere. She came to seek life, as has always been done. But today, life is no longer sought: it hides. It is silent. It trembles.

What is happening is not new. It is only more exposed. More brutal. More assumed. As if the world had stopped pretending. As if leaders, both there and here, had finally said aloud what they have always whispered to each other: we always choose the order that protects us, even if it crushes others. From Nord Alexis preferred over Firmin, from Préval preferred over Manigat, from this average filth (1) that confuses prudence with abdication, Haiti has learned to survive in silence (Hall 2022). And its children, elsewhere, repeat the same gesture.

Fear has permanently settled among immigrants. It insinuates itself into ordinary actions: going to work, driving, answering a door. The migratory hunt reveals a truth that we pretended to ignore: the immigrant is tolerated only as long as they bow down. As long as they work silently. As long as they claim no name, no rights, no dignity. As soon as they raise their head, they become suspect.

We run an economy whose keys and narratives we possess neither. We are the faceless force, the sweat without memory. And in return, we are offered humiliation, precarity, expulsion as our horizon. It is a colonialism without visible chains, a modern slavery where the whip has been replaced by law, and the hold by endless waiting.

We were sold the American dream as one sells a biblical promise. But for many, this dream has transformed into anxious survival, organized silence, and the acceptance of the unacceptable. We did not leave out of pride, but out of necessity. Because our states have collapsed, because politics has deserted the common good, because staying had become another form of death.

The world is hardening. Ideologies of rejection advance without masks. What shocked yesterday reassures today. Faced with this, blindness is no longer a mistake: it is complicity.

And Haiti, in all of this, remains suspended between two silences: that of those who leave, and that of those who govern without ever returning to the essential: human dignity is not negotiable. It is not requested. It is recognized.

In any case, here, we don't even think about it because if the 'White' is for them, they firmly believe that no one will be against them…

(1) Alin Louis Hall

Yves Lafortune, Miami, January 28, 2026