New Orleans diaspora

The New Orleans diaspora refers to the population evacuated or forced to flee from New Orleans, Louisiana, by the effects of Hurricane Katrina in the late summer of 2005.

As of July 1, 2008, New Orleans had a population of 311,853, a decrease in population from the 445,000 residents of the city prior to Hurricane Katrina.

Prior to Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans had experienced a decrease in population of 18% (109,000 residents) between 1970 and 2000, and which fell by a further 6% (30,000 residents) from 2000 to 2005.

In the initial period following Hurricane Katrina, there were several useful sources of data about where displaced residents from New Orleans were living. In particular, information on the location of refugees was available from change-of-address forms filed with the U.S. Postal Service and from registrations with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for aid. Analyses of these data showed that nearly 15% of evacuees from New Orleans relocated to distant cities in the East Coast, Midwest, and West Coast. The main destinations for displaced residents were suburban New Orleans, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, and Baton Rouge.

As of 2008, just over half of the city’s adult residents (56 percent) were African American, roughly one in three (35 percent) were Caucasian, and 5 percent were Hispanic. This is roughly equivalent to the shape of the population in a 2006 survey, fielded one year after Katrina. It is also fairly similar to the city’s pre-storm distribution as measured by the Census Bureau’s 2005 American Community Survey (ACS), which found that the adult population was 60 percent African American and 32 percent Caucasian.

In the aftermath of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, the issue of human rights was studied closely. The UN Human Rights Committee issued a 2006 report recommending that the United States endeavor to make certain the rights of poor and black Americans "are fully taken into consideration in the reconstruction plans with regard to access to housing, education and health care". The American Civil Liberties Union and the National Prison Project also documented mistreatment of the prison population during the flooding. In 2008, the Institute for Southern Studies, a nonpartisan research center, published a report on "Hurricane Katrina and the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement". The study was one of five published by the ISS on the consequences of Hurricane Katrina, and was a collaborative work produced along with the Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement, co-directed by Walter Kälin, the Representative of the UN Secretary-General on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons. The report found that the U.S. government neglected to adhere to "internationally recognized human rights principles the Bush administration has promoted in other countries." From May to June 2008, United Nations Special Rapporteur Doudou Diène was invited by the U.S. government to visit and study racial discrimination in the U.S. Diène's 2008 report was delivered to the United Nations Human Rights Council and was published in 2009.

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