Supporters want the State Department to waive the visa limit and thereby bolster the ranks of expatriate Haitians.

The argument is based on more than compassion: Haitians abroad already send more than $1 billion back home each year, about a sixth of the gross domestic product for the hemisphere’s most impoverished nation.

“They’ll be able to send money to help their families back in Haiti,” said North Miami Mayor Andre Pierre, whose city of 57,000 is roughly a third Haitian and would anticipate absorbing thousands of the visa-holders if they were bumped to the front of the immigration line. “Then (their families) won’t have to be constantly asking the United States government and other international communities for help, constantly trying to get aid from them when they can help themselves.”

Pierre, himself a Haitian immigrant, put forth a resolution last year that his colleagues in the U.S. Conference of Mayors approved urging the administration to issue the visas it has promised.

Federal officials are reviewing the issue, said Chris Bentley, a spokesman for the Citizenship and Immigration Services agency.

Allowing the 55,000 Haitians to jump the visa line could suddenly burden the infrastructure and environment for a population that has grown rapidly in the last 10 years because of immigration, both legal and illegal, said David North, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.

And there’s no guarantee that they wouldn’t create a void when they left, he said.

“These 55,000 are probably above average in income, education and luck. They’re not a cross-section of Haitian society — they’re probably already considerably better off than the average Haitian,” North said.

“If those people come from Haiti, the money that had previously come to them from the United States will just stop coming, and that’s hard on Haiti.”

Even so, proponents of the speeded-up visa plan call remittances by expatriate Haitians an economic lifeline to a country that — between the rubble, a cholera outbreak and political unrest — still seems in many respects as if the quake happened last week, not last year.

The magnitude 7.0 earthquake on Jan. 12, 2010, killed more than 230,000. Roughly a million remain homeless amid the debris and stuttering reconstruction efforts in Port-au-Prince.

Survivors now in the U.S., many of whom were airlifted for medical care, say they’ll mark the anniversary feeling blessed to be alive, but also anxious about what the next year will bring.

Many survive only on the financial support of relatives or charities because in their scramble to get out of Haiti they were not granted papers by the U.S. allowing them to work. Even those who were granted permission to work have had trouble finding jobs as they navigate medical care for injured children and bureaucracy in finding someplace to live.

“I’m not allergic to work — I’ll cut grass, I’ll do anything,” said Prevener Julian, a 42-year-old farmer and market vendor who accompanied his 8-year-old son Belix, who needed treatment for head trauma. Julian is living in a Miami homeless shelter.

Many of the Haitians brought to the U.S. in the first weeks of the international aid effort thought they would be going back after a while. Now, they are not so sure.

The shock and disruption of the earthquake has been followed by the shock of the reality that going back is nowhere near a viable option.

“Now they have to readjust to living here,” said Elsie St. Louis-Accilien, executive director of Haitian-Americans United for Progress, a community-based organization in Queens. “These are people who did not plan on doing this.”

Valerie Placide, who fled with her 9-year-old son in the days after the quake, has watched from Spring Valley, N.Y., just north of New York City and some 1,500 miles from Haiti, as recovery efforts floundered, cholera killed more than 3,600 and political unrest turned to riots.

“You’ve spent a year hoping that everything would be better,” Placide said. Instead, she said, “I’m not hopeful at all.”

Thousands of children were evacuated to the U.S. following the quake. Sitting with his mother in a Miami shelter last week, 10-year-old Peterson Exais contemplated someday returning to Port-au-Prince, where he spent four days buried beneath the rubble of his house. Thin, pale scars cut through his hair and circle his left eye.

“It’s better here,” he says in the English he’s learned this past year in hospitals and school. “Haiti is broken.”

——

Associated Press writer Deepti Hajela in New York contributed to this report.

Associated Press journalists saw flames leaping from the roof of the Unity party headquarters, the center of Celestin’s campaign. Witnesses said the building in central Port-au-Prince was on fire for an hour.

Protesters said security guards shot demonstrators as they assaulted the building, but there were no confirmed injures in the fire or demonstration. Several fire trucks tried to control the blaze — an unusual scene in a city with few reliable public services.

Preval urged the candidates to call off the protests.

“This is not how the country is supposed to work,” he said in a live radio speech. “People are suffering because of all this damage.”

The president dismissed allegations that fraud invalidated the election results and faulted the U.S. Embassy for its criticism of the vote, saying it would be up to the country’s Provisional Electoral Council, known as the CEP, to review the results.

“If there are problems we can sit down and personally discuss it, but the American Embassy is not the CEP,” he said.

The official preliminary results have law professor and former first lady Mirlande Manigat in first with 31.4 percent of the vote and Celestin next with 22.5. Martelly has 21.8 percent — trailing Celestin by about 6,800 votes.

Hundreds of protesters massed near the offices of the electoral council in Petionville, with young men hurling rocks at U.N. peacekeepers in armored personnel carriers. The international troops and police occasionally responded with volleys of tear gas.

The area around the electoral office includes a plaza that is home to several thousand people in a tent encampment erected after the Jan. 12 earthquake so it was unclear whether all of the people on the street were protesters or if some were spectators. Also uncertain were the intentions of the demonstrators.

“If Michel Martelly is not president, in a day or two days things are going to get a lot worse,” said 22-year-old Lucate Hans, carrying a stick and the pink campaign poster of his candidate. “Tensions are going to rise and we are going to kill people.”

The results, announced after hours of delays Tuesday evening, were immediately questioned at home and abroad. The U.S. Embassy said the results did not match reports by official election observers who said Celestin would likely be eliminated in the first round.

An appeals period is open for the next three days, and election observers said a third candidate might be included in a Jan. 16 runoff if the electoral council decides the first-round vote was close enough — though the constitutionality of such a move would be debatable.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has expressed concern about allegations of fraud and the violence and he urged candidates to use only formal, legal procedures to make any challenges to the results, U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said.

“He reminds all candidates that they have a personal responsibility to encourage their supporters to remain calm and to stop violence. A peaceful solution to the current situation is crucial not only to confront the cholera epidemic in the short-term but also to create the conditions in the medium term for recovery and development from the earthquake,” Nesirky said at U.N. headquarters in New York.

But the protesters would not wait, and marched through the streets. About 2,000 pro-Martelly demonstrators also gathered near the U.S. Embassy but dispersed without incident.

“We want to tell them Martelly is the president. We won’t accept anything less. Otherwise we will set this country on fire,” Frances Odis said.

Martelly supporters also set up flaming barricades in Petionville, the smoke of burning tires blackening the air. Thousands were on the streets, singing political songs and chanting for “Micky.”

Vehicles were damaged by rocks and items were reportedly stolen from stores. Foreign aid workers complained that Haitian national police were slow to respond and that many officers refused to report to duty following the election results.

American Airlines halted flights in and out of the Haitian capital because airport employees were unable to get to work Wednesday because of demonstrations, spokeswoman Martha Pantin said.

In Les Cayes residents said government buildings had been attacked and set on fire.

Martelly had said before results were released that he believed he would win, and would not accept a spot in a runoff in which Celestin is present. He had not made a statement Wednesday, though some of his staffers had praised the protests on Twitter.

Thousands of voters were disenfranchised by confusion on the rolls during the Nov. 28 election and there were many reported incidents of ballot-stuffing, violence and intimidation confirmed by international observers.

Turnout was low according to the preliminary results, as just over 1 million people cast accepted ballots out of some 4.7 million registered voters. It is not known how many ballots were thrown out for fraud.

Officials acknowledged the rolls were both bloated and incomplete, with hundreds of thousands of earthquake dead still registered and many living voters waiting for ID cards. In the last days of counting, tabulators had to sort out clearly fraudulent tally sheets.

The U.N. secretary-general has said the problems were worse than originally reported. But the U.N. peacekeepers and the joint Organization of American States-Caribbean Community observer mission said the problems did not invalidate the vote.

The chief observer with the OAS-Caricom mission, Colin Granderson, appealed for patience.

“Remember that the results are only preliminary results,” Granderson told AP. “For all candidates who believe there were irregularities or fraud, there are recourses provided by the electoral law.”

Manigat, a 70-year-old law professor, is the wife of former Haitian president Leslie Manigat who served briefly in the late 1980s after a much-criticized election before being deposed by a coup. Her supporters include a powerful senator who organized violent protests in his home department ahead of the first round of voting.

Celestin, a virtual unknown before the election, is the candidate of Preval’s Unity party. He is the head of the state-run construction company whose trucks carted bodies and limited amounts of rubble out of the city after the Jan. 12 quake.

His campaign was the best-funded of the group but Preval’s inability to jump-start a moribund economy or push forward reconstruction after the massive earthquake drained his support. Many voters said they would accept “anyone but Celestin,” whom they equate with the unpopular Preval.

The clear winner in the bid for Senate seats was Preval’s party, which advanced to a run-off in eight of the 10 races in which it competed and won a ninth outright.

Independent candidate, Steven Benoit, a former member of Preval’s abandoned Lespwa movement who championed an increase in the minimum wage, won the 11th Senate seat for the area including Port-au-Prince.

——

Associated Press writers Jacob Kushner in Port-au-Prince and Ben Fox in San Juan, Puerto Rico, contributed to this report

The cholera outbreak that began last month has brought increased misery to the entire country, still struggling with the aftermath of last January’s earthquake. But anger has been particularly acute in the north, where the infection is newer, health care sparse and people have died at more than twice the rate of the region where the epidemic was first noticed.

The health ministry said Tuesday that the official death toll hit 1,034 as of Sunday. Figures are released following two days of review.

Aid workers say the official numbers may understate the epidemic. While the ministry of health says more than 16,700 people have been hospitalized nationwide, Doctors Without Borders reports that its clinics alone have treated at least 16,500.

On Tuesday, during a second day of rioting throughout northern Haiti, local reporters said a police station was burned in Cap-Haitien and rocks thrown at peacekeeping bases. A small protest was also reported in the northwestern city of Gonaives, but U.N. police said it ended peacefully.

In the town of Limbe, west of Cap-Haitien, the unrest carried through the night Monday as screams and chants filled the streets, said Beth Macy, a reporter for The Roanoke Times who accompanied a Virginia medical mission to Haiti. The group hunkered down in the hospital as protesters pelted the gate with stones, she said in a newspaper blog post.

The violence has combined some Haitians’ long-standing resentment of the 12,000-member U.N. military mission with the internationally shared suspicion that the U.N. base could have been a source of the infection.

Health experts have called for an independent investigation into whether Nepalese peacekeepers introduced the South Asian strain of cholera to Haiti, where no case of cholera had ever been documented before late October.

The U.N. denies responsibility, and a mission spokesman said the protests were politically motivated. Haiti’s national elections are scheduled for Nov. 28.

Cholera is transmitted by feces and can be all but prevented if people have access to safe drinking water and regularly wash their hands.

But sanitary conditions don’t exist in much of Haiti, and the disease has spread across the countryside and to nearly all the country’s major population centers, including the capital, Port-au-Prince. There are concerns it could eventually sicken hundreds of thousands of people.