Constructing New Orleans,
Constructing Race: A Population
History of New Orleans
Elizabeth Fussell
How do we understand the racial and ethnic recomposition of New Orleans's diminished
population in the year following Hurricane Katrina? Optimists viewing the influx of Latino migrants see in it a revival of the multicultural past of New Orleans, while skeptics
suspect that delays in government assistance for residents to return to the city are an attempt to keep out low-income blacks and make the city whiter and wealthier. The shifts
in the population of New Orleans are familiar to sociologists and economists who study
labor-market demand for low-skill, inexpensive, and flexible workers. The low-prestige
jobs they do are reserved for those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, most often immigrants or members of stigmatized minorities.' The sociodemographic characteristics
of workers building and rebuilding the city shift only when social and market forces
combine to make one group less expensive and more flexible than the other. I use this
sociological insight to analyze New Orleans's population history and the way race has
been socially constructed and reconstructed there.
The population history of New Orleans falls into three distinct periods. In the first,
from the city's founding until the end of the nineteenth century (1718-1899), migration-driven population growth provided the city with the labor of African slaves, their
descendants, and the Irish and Italian migrants who replaced them. The second period
(1900-2005) was characterized by slower growth, driven by births and longer life expectancy rather than net in-migration, and the consolidation of a biracial society. The last
period (2005-present) began after New Orleans's population vacated the city in the wake
of Katrina, pre-Katrina residents selectively returned to the city, and an influx of largely
undocumented Latino migrant workers arrived. The incorporation of that last group into
New Orleans's society will depend on the continued demand for low-wage construction
and service workers, the degree to which the federai and state governments facilitate the
return of the pre-Katrina population that made up the previously majority-black labor
force, and the enforcement of anti-immigrant policies such as employer sanctions and
deportations of undocumented workers—all factors that afl^ect the construction of a lowwage, low-skill, and disposable labor force. (See figure 1.)
EJizabetb Fussell is an assistant professor of sociology at Washington State University and an adjunct assistant professor in the International Health and Development Program in the School of Public Health and Iropical Medicine
at Tulane University. She would like to thank Melissa Abelev for assistance in the preparation of this manuscript.
Readers may contact Fussell at fussell@wsu.edu.
' Michael Piore, Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Tntbtstrial Societies {Q3Tn\ii\6%e, Mass., 1979),
846
The Journal of American History
December 2007
A Population History of New Orleans
847
Population of New Orleans by race, legal status, and nativity, in
percentages, 1769-2000
wliiu-s
enslaved blacks
blacks
fbrcign-born
Q ] others
Figure 1. As New Orleans grew, the racial and ethnic mix of its population and the ways of characterizing that tnix underwent changes. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the in-migration
of Africans and their descendants and of Europeans accounted for rapid growth and an increasingly
white population. In the twentieth, as natural increase, longer lives, and suburbanization drove
population trends, the proportion of blacks in a more slowly growing population rose. NOTE: The
geographic boundaries of New Orleans changed with each census year. From 1950 to 2000, the
population is reported for the Metropolitan Statistical Area. People included in the foreign-born
category are not included in the other, racial, categories. Due to rounding, percentages may not
equal 100. SOURCES: Data for 1769 to 1860 are calculated from Richard Campanella, Geographies
of New Orleans: Urhan Fabrics before the Storm (Lafayette, 2006), 193-203. Data for 1850 to 2000
are calculated from Steven Ruggles et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 3.0 (Minneapolis, 2004), htrp://usa.impums,org/usa/. For 1850 and 1860, data from both sources are combined to estimate distribution since IPUMS data include only the free population and Campanella
does not report nativity.
New Orleans's Builders: Slaves, Convicts, and Migrants
New Orleans's origin story is often told as a cultural gumbo recipe tbat ignores tbe social forces mixing Spanish and Frencb colonists, Englisb mercantilists, African slaves,
and later waves of German, Irisb, Italian, and otber migrants. Througbout the period of
sertiement and growth, the commercial elite routinely relied on force and coercion to get
rhe work of building New Orleans performed. In 1718 jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur
de Bienville, selected a natural levee as the site for New Orleans. A large labor force was
necessary to make tbat piece of land, subject to regular flooding and endemic waterborne
The Journal of American History
December 2007
disease, habitable. In 1719 tbe French colonial Compagnie des Indes imported one thousand European criminals and contract laborers to fortify New Orleans's natural levees.
They soon died of disease and starvation, and the company immediately undertook to
import African captives. Though mortality rates were high for the slaves, those who survived built levees, dug drainage ditches, cleared forests, and prepared timber for building
boats and houses. Without the institution of slavery. New Orleans would not exist, since
only force could keep these workers at their labor, while European contract farmers and
workers arriving in the city moved on to more hospitable territory further inland.^
When the U.S. government took ownership of cosmopolitan New Orleans on December 20, 1803, it acquired a city that immediately ranked as the ninth largest in the country and a port with extensive trade networks throughout Europe, North America, the
Caribbean region, and Latin America. At the time only one-ninth of the city's population
was of African origin. The city more than doubled in size after ten thousand refugees from
the 1794-1804 rebellion in Haiti found a new home in New Orleans in 1809. The Saint
Domingue refugees included French colonists, free Creoles of color, and ex-slaves, many
of whom were returned to bondage after setting foot on American shores. (See figure 2.)
Their arrival consolidated the tripartite racial order. The 1810 census records the city's
population as about one-third white, one-third free people of color, and one-third African
slaves, who constituted the bottom of the labor market and the socioeconomic ladder.^
Throughout its early history, immigration drove population growth in New Orleans,
and the city grew exceptionally fast—by 366 percent—between 1830 and 1860. Most
of the new immigrants arrived from Cermany and Ireland, with smaller streams coming
from other countries, most of them European. No longer replenished by slave imports
after 1808, the slave population was outstripped by that of the Irish, who quickly formed
the bulk of New Orleans's working class. The construction company that in 1838 dug the
New Basin Canal with wheelbarrows and shovels to connect the Central Business District
and Lake Pontcbartrain and to expand trade routes in the Culf South deemed slaves too
valuable to expose to the risk of malaria, cholera, and yellow fever. The company hired
cheap Irish labor instead; at least six thousand, but perhaps many more, of those workers
perished as a result/
After rhe Civil War Louisiana's business elite had two concerns regarding the labor
force: Who would maintain the levees on whose safety the commercial port depended?
And who would perform the agricultural labor on the sugar and cotton plantations? In
the past only slaves and desperately poor immigrants had done the dangerous work necessary to keep a low-lying, saturated city dry. Few Louisianians believed that they could attract a free labor force to undertake such work. So in 1867 the state legislature authorized
the use of convict labor on levee work, arguing it would save the state money and repair
the morals of the mostly black or Irish men so engaged. Finding a sufficient number of
' Richard Campanella, Geographies of New Orleans: Urban fabrics befitre the Storm (Xjafa.yeae, 2006), 193-203;
Daniel H. Usner Jr., "From African Captivity to American Slavery: The Introduction of Black Laborers to Colonial
Ixjuisiana," Louisiana History, 20 (Winter 1979), 2 5 ^ 8 .
^ Paul Lachance, "The 1809 Immigration of Saint-Domingue Refugees to New Orleans: Reception, Integration,
and Impact," Louisiana History, 29 (Spring 1988), 109-41; Campanella, Geographies of New Orleans, 194-95.
* Fredrick Mar Spletstoser, "The Impact of the Immigrants on New Orleans," in Ihe Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History, vol, X: A Refuge for All Ages: Immigration in Louisiana History, ed. Carl A, Brasseaux (Lafayette, 1996), 287-322; Campanella, Geographies of New Orleans, 224; Earl F Niehaus, "The New Irish,
1830-1862," in Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History, X. ed. Brasseaux, 378-91.
A Population History of New Orleans
849
Figure 2. The arrival often thousatid refugees in New Orleans after the 1794-1804 slave
rebellion in Haiti contributed to the doubling of New Orleans's population between
1805 and 1810 and increased the size of the city's black population relative to the populations of other groups. Free blacks in Saint Domingue (modern-day Haiti) are represented in this hand-colored engraving hy J. Laroque, after a drawing by J. F, Labrousse,
Ne^e & Negresse de St. Domingue. in Jacques Grasset Saint-Sauveur, Encyclopedia des
voyages, contenant I'ahrege historique des moeurs, usages, habitudes domestiques, religions,
fetes.. . . (An encyclopedia of travel, containing a historical abstract of the manners, customs, domestic hahits, religions, festivals. . . .)(Paris, Deroy, 1796). Courtesy Louisiana '
State Museum.
laborers remained a problem until the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took over the work
in 1882 and soon after replaced unskilled laborers with machines.^
To attract new agricultural laborers, the Louisiana state legislature in 1866 passed a
law establishing a commissioner of immigration. State agents tried to recruit migrants
from Germany, Belgium, Mexico, and Italy and even among the Chinese in Cuba. But
postbellum Louisiana could not compete with the industrial magnets of the Northeast
or the homesteads of the West. In the end, whites continued to rely on subordinated
black sharecroppers and casual laborers. Lynching and intimidation, plus the lack of a
^ Louisiana Board of Levee Commissioners, Memorial to the Legislature by the Board of Levee Commissioners on
the Employment of Convict Labor (New Orleans, 1867); Albert E. Cowdrey, Land's End: A History of the New Orleans
District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Its Lifebng Battle with the Lower Mississippi and Other Rivers Wending
Their Way to the Sea (New Orleans, 1977).
850
The Journal of American History
December 2007
free market for mobile wage labor, effectively confined black laborers to agricultural occupations in the Deep South from emancipation through the beginning of the twentieth
century.^
As migration to New Orleans slacked off, its foreign-born stock was replenished mostly by those who already had family and friends in the city. Few new migrant streams developed; instead the extensive social networks of the Irish and Italians continued to draw
newcomers to the city. However, by the late 1880s the flow of Irish migrants shifted from
New Orleans to industrializing cities in the northern United States. Sicilian migrants, in
contrast, were arriving in unprecedented numbers as political and economic changes in
Italy drove them away. Merchants who had been plying the trade routes connecting Sicily and New Orleans since the early nineteenth century found it easy to recruit them as
agricultural workers and urban laborers. The Sicilians supplanted the Irish as the stigmatized working class, who, along with blacks, did much of the menial labor of the city. By
1910 Sicilian migrants and their descendants formed 39 percent of Louisiana's population. Nevertheless, the era of migration-driven population growth in New Orleans had
come to a close: Berween 1850 and 1900 New Orleans fell from fifth to twelfth rank in
population in the national urban hierarchy/
New Orleans Becomes a Biracial City
In contrast to the fast-industrializing northeastern and midwestern economies, with their
burgeoning factories. New Orleans's agro-export economy required few urban laborers
but rather depended on the region's agricultural productivity for its profits. Consequently, the population of New Orleans grew more slowly than those of Chicago, St. Louis,
Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee, dropping New Orleans from twelfth to sixteenth
place in the urban hierarchy between 1900 and 1950. New Orleans maintained its position only by connecting the railways that ended there to the ocean freighters."
Simultaneously, New Orleans shifted from a tripartite to a biracial society, in which
people were socially and legally categorized as either white or black, much earlier than
other American cities by dint of the consolidation of Jim Crow segregation.'' As in many
northern cities today, the explicitly unequal treatment of those racial groups has been re^ E, Russ Williams Jr., "Louisiana's Public and Private Immigration Endeavors: 1866-93," Louisiana History
15 (Spring 1974), 153-73; Charles Shanabruch, "The Louisiana Immigration Movement, 1891-1907: An Analysis of Efforts, Attitudes, and Opportunities." in Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History, X, ed,
Brasseaux, 501-20; Jay R, Mandle, "Continuity and Change: The Use of Black Labor after the Civil ^ar" Journal
of Black Studies, 21 {June 1991), 414—27: Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Tiights Struggle in Louisiana, J915-1972 (Athens, Gs.. 1995).
' Ethelyn Orso. "Sicilian Immigration into Louisiana," in Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana
History, X, ed. Brasseaux, 603-7; Williams, "Louisiana's Public and Private Immigration Endeavors"; Campbell
Gibson, Population of the One Hundred Largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States: 1790 to 1990
(Washington, 1990), table 1, available at U.S. Census Bureau, http://www,census.gov/popuktion/documenEation/
twps0027/tab01.txt.
" David R. Goldfield, "The Urban South: A Regional YmmevioiVr American Historical Review, 86 (Dec. 1981),
1009-34; Timothy J. Harton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact
(New York, 1998); Cees D. Eysberg, "The Origins of the American Urban System: Historical Accident and Initial
Advanage" Journal of Urban History, 15 (Feb. 1989), 185-95; Gibson, Population of the One Hundred Largest Cities
and Other Urban Places in the United States, table 1.
'' Northern cities became biracial only as the Creat Migration (1915-1965) sent southern blacks in search of
industrial employment after immigration restrictions closed off the European migrant labor pool. James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel
Hill, 2005),
A Population History of New Orleans
851
produced through an interlocking system of tmequal educational opportunities, residential segregation, and employment discrimination. Even as school attendance rates rose
steeply across the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, in New Orleans
hlacks were consistently far less likely than whites to complete secondary school, even to
the present. The effect of racial educational Inequality during "the human capital century" has been to diminish the labor-market opportunities and life chances of the individuals that lag behind. Blacks became the low-skill, low-wage labor force on which New
Orleans's tourist-based economy has increasingly relied since the oil Industry collapsed In
the 1980s.'"
The residential segregation of New Orleans occurred in stages in the course of the
twentieth century. Before then. New Orleanians lived tn mixed neighborhoods since
black domestic servants and workers often live In the blocks between the grand avenues
of the wealthy whites. During the Jim Crow era, whites moved to the new neighborhoods
that were created by draining the swampland around the edges of the city. The expansion
of the streetcar system also allowed blacks to live In neighborhoods farther from their employers. But the creation of racially segregated New Deal public housing developments
was the first implementation of legally enforced residential segregation in the city. When
the civil rights movement integrated public elementary and secondary schools, the fiight
of the white middle class to the suburbs accelerated both residential and educational segregation and set In motion the social forces that contributed to the city's population loss
after I960. (See figure 3.)"
This out-migration was racially selective, and after 1980 the city of New Orleans
(Orleans Parish) had a black majority, although the metropolitan area, which includes
suburbs, did not. The biracial dynamic of the city was hardly challenged by the small
numbers of Latin American migrants—mostly Cubans, Hondurans, Mexicans, and Nicaraguans^—that arrived in the city at distinct moments in the mid-twentieth century and
the Vietnamese migrants that arrived in the late 1970s.'- The new Asian and Latino migrants, as well as some European migrants, were welcomed and incorporated into New
Orleans society at a time when native-born blacks were still struggling to gain their civil
rights.
Although the shift in population from city to suburb did not retard the growth of the
metropolitan area overall, between 1950 and 2000, New Orleans fell from sixteenth to
thirty-fifth place among metropolitan statistical areas in population. The port, oil, and
tourist enterprises in New Orleans lacked the generative power of the technology industries that boomed elsewhere in the United States in the late twentieth century. As a result,
the city was unable to attract new residents or to keep many of its current residents.'^
'" 1 calculated school attendance and graduation rates from Steven Ruggles et al., Integrated Public Use Microdita Series: Version 3.0 (Minneapolis, 2004), http://usa.ipums.org/usa/. John Hardin Best. "Education in the
Forming of the American Sourh," History of Education Quarterly, 36 (Spring 1996), 39-51; Claudia Goldin, "The
Human-Capital Century and American Leadership: Virtues of the Past," Journal of Economic History 61 Oune
2001). 263-92,
" Daphne Spain. "Race Relations and Residential Segregation in New Orleans: Two Centuries of Panidox,"
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 441 (Jan. 1979). 82-96, esp. 89-91; Carl L, Bankscon iiiid Stephen J. Caldas. Troubled Dream: The Promise and Failure of School Desegregation in Louisiana (Nashville. 2002); Steven G, Rivkin. "Residential Segregation and School Integration." Sociology of Education, 67 (Oct.
1994), 279-92.
'^ Campaneila, Geographies of New Orleans.
" Gibson, Population of the One Hundred Largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States, table 1;
"Ranking Tables for Metropolitan Areas: Population in 2000 and Population Change from 1990 to 2000." PHC-T-3,
table 3: "Metropolitan Areas Ranked by Population: 2000." U.S. Census Bureau: United States Census 2000. http://
The Journal of American History
852
December 2007
Growth of New Orleans's population, 1769-2000
700,000
600,000
500.000
400,000
300,000
200,000
100,000
1769 IKIO18201830184018!i0186018701880189015001910 1910 1930194019501960197019S019902000
Figure 3. For over two centuries, the population of New Orleans grew. After 1960, in the
wake of school integration, the flight of the white middle class to the suburbs set in motion
changes char led ro a decline in population. NOTE: The geographic boundaties of New Orleans changed with each census year. Ftom 1950 to 2000, the population is reported fot the
Metropolitan Statistical Atea. SOURCES; Data fot 1769 to 1860 are calculated from Richard
Campanella, Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabrics before the Storm (Lafayette, 2006),
193-203. Data for 1850 to 2000 are calculated from Steven Ruggles et al.. Integrated Public
Use Microdata Series: Version 3.0 (Minneapolis, 2004), http://usa.impums.otg/iisa/. For 1850
and I860, data ftom both sources are combined to estimate distribution since IPUMS data
include only the free population and Campanella does not tepott nativity.
On the eve of Katrina, New Orleans laid claim to a host of dubious records. In 2005,
24.5 percent of residents lived below the poverty level compared with 13.3 percent for
the United States as a whole; 17.7 percent had less than a complete high school education compared with 15.8 percent for the United States; the median household income
was $30,711 compared with $46,242 for the United States. Those figures were even worse
for the city's black residents. New Orleans's history of racial differentiation had created a
class of residents who were exceptionally vulnerable to the catastrophe that occurred on
August 29, 2005. Consequently, race and class powerfully conditioned not only how New
Orleanians evacuated but also how and whether they would ever return.''*
wvvw.census.gov/popularion/www/cen2000/phc-t3.html; James R. Elliott and Marcd Ionescu, "Postwar Immigrarion to the Deep Souch Triad; What Can a Peripheral Region Tell Us about Immigrant Settlement and Employmeni?," Sociological Spectrum, 23 (April 2003), 159-80; Vincent Maruggi and Gordon Saussy. Migration in Louisiana, 1970-1980: An Indicator of the State Economy's Performance {He.yN Ov\cz\\^, 1985).
'•* Gibson. Population of the One Hundred largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States, table 1;
Susan L. Cutter and Christopher T Emrich, "Moral Hazard, Social Catastrophe: The Changing Face of Vulnerability along the Huxnc3.ne Coasis," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 604 (March 2006),
102-12; James R. Elliott and Jeremy Pais, "Race. Class, and Hurricane Katrina: Social Differences in Human Responses to Disaster," Social Science Research. 35 {June 2006), 295-321; Timothy J. Haney, James R. Elliott, and
Elizabeth Fussell, "Families and Hurricane Response: Evacuation, Separation, and the Emotional Toll of Hurricane
Katrina," in The Sociology of Katrina: Perspectives on a Modem Catastrophe, ed. David Brusma (New York, 2007),
71-90.
A Population History of New Orleans
853
The Post-Katrina Population of New Orleans: Newcomers, Returnees, and
Evacuees
While the Army Corps of Engineers and che employees of Jefferson and Orleans parishes
drained the flooded city, the demand for laborers to clean up the soggy mess surged.
Foreign-born Hispanic migrants were the first to respond to chat demand, jusc as they
have followed che construction boom chroughout the New Souch. Thac is noc surprising,
since workers born in Mexico and Central America make up about 21 percent of the U.S.
construction labor force. Although many New Orleanians were unprepared to see those
unfamiliar faces and hear strange languages in cheir nearly empty city, the newcomer
Latino migrants were the rapid-response labor force that was necessary to reconscrucc
New Odeans.'^
Nevertheless, the migrants received a mixed reception. Tlie federal government welcomed the labor force by suspending the Davis-Bacon Act mandating thac federal contractors pay prevailing wages and by waiving sanctions against employers who hired
undocumenced workers, thereby letting market forces reign."^ New Orleanians able to
return home were pleased to find workers Co clean out their moldy belongings, gut houses
and other buildings, repair and replace roofs, and paint over the cryptic markings left on
their doors by search-and-rescue crews. Displaced New Orleanians in che newly formed
diaspora, many of them former renters, resented che speedy arrival of Hispanic workers while they waited to find ouc when they could return home or receive assistance or
whether the city would devise a plan for rebuilding the most devastaced neighborhoods.
Such New Orleanians, many of them working-class blacks, understood chat they would
not be part of New Orieans's reconstruction labor force, ac least noc unless they accepted the conditions—dangerous work without adequate protection, lack of housing, low
wages—that migrants tolerated. New Orleans's hiscory wich race and class shaped the
experience of the flood and evacuation. Low-income black neighborhoods in low-lying
areas sufl^ered a disproportionate share of the floodwater, while wealthier, whiter neighborhoods on higher land stayed dry. Those disadvantages accumulated more rapidly for
those who were already disadvancaged—mostly low-income blacks—creating more obstacles CO cheir recurn.'^
The repopulation of the city has disproportionately drawn those with more resources.
Resources in this case are defined by what you had before the storm—a home, job, savings, and insurance—and whether ic survived. The return rate has been highest among che
34 percent of the city's households deemed to have minor or no damage, while a tnuch
smaller percentage of che populacion from the 66 percent of households that experienced
serious and severe damage returned. Those returning co homes in the damaged areas were
''' "Table 4.8a Occupation of Employed Foreign-Born Civilian Workers from Latin America 16 Years and Over
by Sex and Sub-Region of Birth; 2003," U.S. Census Bureau, http://www.census.gov/population/socdcmo/foreign/
ST023/tab4-8a.Kls. Elizabeth Fusselt, "Latino Immigrants in Post-Katrina New Orleans," paper delivered at ihc Regional Seminar on Labor Rights, New Orleans, October 2006, http://www.tulane.edu/-sociol/ftissell.
"' Davis-Bacon Act, 46 Stat. 1494 (1931); Judith Browne-Dianis et al., "And Injustice for All: Workers' Lives in
the Reconstruction of New Orleans," July 2006, Advancement Project, http://www.advancementproject.org/reports/
workersreport.pdf; Gregory Rodriguez, "La Nueva Orleans: Latino Immigrants, Many of Ihcm Here Illegally, Will
Rebuild tbe Culf Coast-—and Stay Here," Los Angeles Times, Sept. 25, 2005, p. Ml.
'^ laurel E. Flcrcher et al., "Rebuilding after Katrina: A Population-Based Study of Labor and Human Rights
in New Orleans," June 2006, http://www.payson.tulane.edu/katrina/katrina_report_final.pdf; John R. Logan, '"The
Impact of Katrina: Race and Class in Storm-Damaged Neighborhoods," 2005, Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences Initiative, http://www.54.hrown.edu/katrina/report.pdf.
854
"The Journal of American History
December 2007
Population of New Orleans in mid-2005 and mid-2006,
(in numbers) and by race (percentages)
500,000
400,000
300,000
200,000
100.000
mid2005
mid2006
Figure 4. Hurricane Katrina changed the size and makeup of New Orleans's population. The
bar graph on rhe left shows rhe ciry's overall population decline. The pie charts on the right
show the percentages of black, whire, and other residents of New Orleans before and after the
hurricane. SOURCES: "General Characteristics for Orleans Parish, Louisiana," 2005, U.S. Census
Bureau, American Community Survey, http://www.census.gov/acs/www/; Louisiana Public Health
Institute, "2006 Louisiana Health and Population Survey: Survey Report, January 17, 2007, Orleans Parish," Louisiana Health and Population Survey, hrtp://www.popesr.org/popesrla2006/files/
popesr_Orleans_SurveyReporr.pdf.
those with the financial resources to rebuild. The largest federal source of rebuilding aid to
low-income homeowners, the Road Home program, proved too little, too late for most.
On the second anniversary of Katrina, the city of New Orleans is only 67.6 percent of its
pre-Katrina size, with little promise of regaining its pre-storm numbers.'"
The demographic composition of the city is difficult to pin down given the state of
flux of the population. It is widely held that the city is "older, whiter, and more affluent"
than before Katrina, since black and poor residents were more likely to have lived in devastated areas and in ruined rental property. Many thought residents with children were
less likely to return because schools were so slow to open. Statistics produced since Katrina are subject to large margins of error, but they confirm those impressions. By summer
2006 New Orleans had gone from having a population that was two-thirds black and less
than a third white, with small Asian and Hispanic minorities, to having nearly equal proportions of blacks and whites (47 percent and 42.7 percent respectively) and somewhat
larger Asian (3.5 percent) and particularly Hispanic (9.6 percent) minorities. At the time
of that survey, the city was less than half its pre-Katrina size, and a larger proportion of
whites had returned than blacks. Furthermore, the proportion of Hispanics had grown,
no doubt as a result of the reconstruction labor force. (See figure 4.)'''
"• Kevin F. McCarthy et al., "The Repopulation of New Orleans afrer Hurricane Katrina," 2006, Rand Corporation, http://www.rand.org/puhs/technic3l_reporcs/2006/RAND_TR369.pdt; Bruce Eggler, "State Is Opening
Road Home Center in New Orleans: City Is Opening Offices in CBD and Houston," New Orleans Times-Picayune,
Aug. 22, 2006, "Metro" section, p. 4; Amy Liu and Allison Plyer, "A Review of Key Indicators of Recovery Two
Years after Katrina," Aug. 2007, Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, http://gnocdc.org/NOI_Alndex/
ESNOLAIndexAug07.pdf; "Addendum: Updated Population Statistics from the U.S. Postal Service," ibid
'•* Coleman Warner, "Census Tallies Katrina Changes: But the Changing New Orleans Area Is a Moving Target,"
A Population History of New Orleans
855
The evacuation for Hurricane Katrina forced a recomposition of the population, but
factors that drove population decline in the past continue to operate. Hurricane Katrina
merely accelerated the city's population loss to the suburbs and beyond underway since
the 1960s. The factors driving that trend—the loss of high-skill, high-wage employment,
poor public schools, a bifurcated housing market, and crime—have been exacerbated
since the storm and continue to discourage displaced residents from returning. New Orleans's population loss will continue. The increased demand for low-skill, low-wage workers has not increased blacks' representation in the city, as it had done in the recent past,
since many displaced New Orleanians from that segment of the labor force lost their
homes or apartments and cannot find affordable rental property. They can find both work
and housing in the communities where they have temporarily settled.
Instead the Hispanic migrant labor force has fulfilled this demand without the expectation of housing assistance, functioning schools, or any other support from the city. Those
migrants serve much the same purpose as the nineteenth-century Irish and Italian migrants did, though it is doubtful that the newcomers will grow as populous. Today's illegal
migrants, who make up a Iarge portion of the influx into New Orleans, typically pursue
a temporary and marginal existence in U.S. society and often face insurmountable legal
obstacles to incorporation, in stark contrast to their nineteenth-century counterparts.^"
As long as there is demand, Hispanic migrants will complement the low-skill, low-wage
labor force that has returned to New Orleans. The factors that influence whether these
migrants stay are similar to those that influence whether low-income, black New Orleanians, as well as others, return: sustained economic growth and labor demand, new stocks
of affordable housing, functioning schools, safe neighborhoods, and renewed investment
in storm protection. In addition, however, the newcomers require at least tolerance for
their undocumented status and at best a pathway to citizenship. Hurricane Katrina created a moment in which the reconstruction of the city allowed for a reconstruction of the
racial order, but it is too soon to say whether a tripartite white-black-brown society reminiscent of the society of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will emerge or whether
the biracial division of the twentieth century will prevail.
New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 7, 2006, national seciion, p. 1; Logan, "Impact of Katrina"; "General Characteristics for Orleans Parish, Louisiana," 2005, U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, hn:p://www,census
.gov/acs/www/; Louisiana Public Health Institute, "2006 Louisiana Health and Population Survey: Survey Report,
January 17, 2007, Orleans Parish," Louisiana Health and Population Survey, hrrp://www.popest.ot^/popestla2006/
fiIes/popest_Otleans_SurveyReport.pdf. Percentages do not sum to 100 because Hispanics are counted separately,
as an ethnic group rathet than a racial group. The total racial distribution is: 42.7% white only; 47.0% black only;
3-5% Asian only; 6.7% others (including American Indian, Alaska native, Native Hawaiian, other Pacific islander,
multiracial, and no answer). The ethnic distribution (Latino/non-Latino) is: 9.6% Latino (of any race); 86.2% nonLatino (of any race); 4.2% not indicated.
•" Joel Petlmann and Roger Waldinger, "Immigrants, Past and Present; A Reconsideration," in The Handbook
of International Migration: The American Experience, ed. Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz. and Josh De Wind
(NewYotk, 1999), 223-38.