Our Tricentennial: 300 years later, is New Orleans still an international city?
11th June 2018 · 0 Comments
By Nicholas Hamburger
Contributing Writer
Editor’s Note: This is an introduction to a series of articles chronicling New Orleans’ immigrant communities. Following the introduction, each ensuing article will home in on a specific international group in the New Orleans metro area, piecing together, through an examination of cultural influence, economic impact, and individual stories, a mosaic of the city’s immigrant communities.
A river, like a highway or a cellular connection, ties together many otherwise separate places. Founded by the French 300 years ago at the mouth of North America’s longest river, New Orleans straddles a vast continent to its north and a marginal sea connected to the Caribbean, the Atlantic and the Panama Canal to its south. The city’s position at the bottom of the Mississippi, which originates in Minnesota and empties out just below New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico, is ideal for an American port. It is apt, then, that New Orleans, after Napoleon took back possession of Louisiana from the Spanish and subsequently sold the territory to the United States, matured into a dynamic gateway to the world. Today, the city still possesses one of the country’s largest port systems, shipping out by way of the Mississippi petroleum, coal and grain exports while importing into the North American interior foreign products like coffee, bananas and sugar.
In the not-so-distant past, however, the Port of New Orleans received a multitude of something else – people. With the ruthless Southern plantation economy booming in the 19th century, enslaved people of African descent were shipped in droves to New Orleans. But on top of this involuntary form of migration, the port city welcomed migrants who hailed from nearly every corner of the globe, transforming New Orleans into a polyglot city imbued with cultural influences from the Caribbean, Latin America, the Mediterranean and various other regions. Indeed, for much of the mid-19th century, New Orleans boasted the second-largest immigrant port in the U.S.
This rich history of multiculturalism informs the city we live in today. Take a walk through New Orleans, and you’ll see buildings in French, Spanish, and West Indian styles. Taste a dish of New Orleans’ famed cuisine, like gumbo, and it testifies to an African influence. But while, in addition to its port, an industry dependent on the arrival of strangers — i.e., tourism — drives the city’s economy today, only 5.9 percent of Orleans Parish is foreign-born, according to the 2016 American Community Survey census. This begs the question: is New Orleans, with its cosmopolitan past and more ambiguis New Orleans, with its cosmopolitan past and more ambiguous multicultural present, still an international city?
Over the course of the next two months, The Louisiana Weekly will explore that question through a series of biweekly articles chronicling New Orleans’ immigrant communities. This article will attempt to provide an introduction to the city’s foreign-born population by situating subsequent articles within the contexts of global migration and the current political environment.
Last year, the UN Department of Economics and Social Affairs counted over 257 million international migrants worldwide, the highest number ever recorded. Of that total, 65.6 million people, also the most ever documented, had been displaced from their homes by violence or persecution, according to the UN Refugee Agency.
This is consequential for New Orleans given that, since the 1980s, North America and Central America have formed one of the world’s most traveled migration corridors, with migrants from the Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras fleeing political instability, economic privation, and gang violence. As Denise Frazier, assistant director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, points out, “Since the banana trade, Hondurans have been welcomed and stayed here for years, cultivating their own rootedness in New Orleans’ culture.” As a city with substantial Central American communities, as well as one of the largest Honduran populations outside of Honduras, New Orleans has continued to be an important destination for Central American migrants since the late nineteenth century.
According to Mary Niall Mitchell, co-director of the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies, “In the 19th century, people wanted immigrants to come. New Orleans was able to be a haven because of its location, but also because New Orleans needed workers.” Regarding current government attitudes toward migration, she added, “And now, the opposite seems true.”
As Mitchell suggests, Western governments, from Europe to the United States, have largely responded to increased global migration in recent years by toughening or erecting national borders in an attempt to keep migrants out. Even before President Trump took office, the U.S. was loath to admit a substantial number of refugees. The Trump administration, however, has limited refugee resettlement like never before, capping the number of international refugees admitted to the U.S. at 45,000 this year, the lowest total ever set.
What’s more, the Trump administration’s animus toward immigration has permeated a variety of its policies. After pledging to construct a wall to prevent immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump issued a travel ban, now in its third iteration, directed at seven majority-Muslim countries. In December, the Trump administration also withdrew from the Global Compact on Migration, an international conference designed to tackle that issue. And then, two months later, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services eliminated from its mission statement the phrase “a nation of immigrants.”
The security of immigrants already in the U.S. is also precarious. Trump has repeatedly attempted to undo the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and his administration went so far as to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, which many fear will deter immigrants from participating in the survey. Lastly, and perhaps of most significance for New Orleans, Trump has threatened to suspend federal funding to so-called “sanctuary cities” — metro areas that do not cooperate in full with ICE.
Mayor Mitch Landrieu, during his time as mayor of New Orleans, vocally supported cities that limit their cooperation with federal immigration enforcement agents, and the New Orleans City Council passed a resolution last year defending DACA and urging Congress to grant permanent legal status to “dreamers,” or undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.
But Landrieu resisted applying the term “sanctuary city” to New Orleans, an assessment U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions agreed with in November when he declared that New Orleans currently complies with federal immigration laws that require the reporting of undocumented immigrants.
Furthermore, with few public programs serving displaced people, Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans (CCANO) functions as the metro area’s go-to organization when it comes to refugee and immigration services. Since the 1960s, CCANO has helped resettle sizable refugee populations from Vietnam, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, and Bosnia and Herzegovina while also assisting large numbers of immigrants from places like Central America and, more recently, Mexico and Brazil.
“Before Hurricane Katrina, the majority of the immigrant population was from Honduras, followed by Nicaragua, Cuba and El Salvador. As the years went on, Honduras remained number one, but there was a shift,” Martin Gutierrez, the division director of CCANO’s Immigration and Refugee Services, noted. Following the storm, Gutierrez said, “More and more people were from Mexico.” Indeed, thousands of Mexican and Brazilian immigrants arrived in New Orleans to help rebuild the city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But, like the majority of the metro area’s foreign-born population, most Mexicans and Brazilians don’t actually reside in New Orleans today.
Rather, the international community has largely settled in the outlying suburbs that cradle the city. Tulane University geographer, Richard Campanella, has pointed out that New Orleans is not unique in this regard — across the U.S., immigrants continue to find safe and affordable housing on the outskirts of major cities.
This is especially true for Jefferson Parish, where the percentage of foreign-born residents jumps to 12.4 percent. On the West Bank, for example, Haitians congregate on Sundays in over a half-dozen churches; mosques, Islamic schools and Arabic classes indicate a notable Arab presence in Metairie; and enough Hondurans have resettled in an enclave of Kenner to warrant the name “Little Honduras.” These constitute only a fragment of the foreign-born communities in the metro area, several of which are also scattered throughout New Orleans East and St. Bernard Parish. It is, however, only fitting that in a place determined by the global interconnectedness of its port, the closer one gets to the airport — that modern-day site of entry for so many immigrants — the more international New Orleans becomes.
This article originally published in the June 11, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
