Political Effects of Population Displacement
In the days following the evacuation of New Orleans, Reuters reported that "nterviews with refugees in Houston, which is expecting many thousands of evacuees to remain, suggest that thousands of blacks who lost everything and had no insurance will end up living in Texas or other U.S. states," and Forbes Magazine notes that "those left homeless will take part in the biggest internal migration of people since the days of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression."
This and other reports suggest that the hurricane will have demographic consequences, particularly in and around Louisiana. Prior to the hurricane, Louisiana was one of a handful of states projected by the U.S. Census department to become a minority-majority state within the next two decades. Because a majority of displaced Louisiana residents are black, this occurrence will likely be delayed in Louisiana, but accelerated in nearby Florida, Georgia and Texas.
It has been noted that the displacement of a significant portion of African Americans from Louisiana is likely to shift the politics of that state in a more conservative direction. Louisiana may also lose a vote in the Electoral College following the 2010 U.S. Census.
Read more about this topic: Political Effects Of Hurricane Katrina
Famous quotes containing the words political, effects and/or population:
“A sincere and steadfast co-operation in promoting such a reconstruction of our political system as would provide for the permanent liberty and happiness of the United States.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“Upon the whole, necessity is something, that exists in the mind, not in objects; nor is it possible for us ever to form the most distant idea of it, consider’d as a quality in bodies. Either we have no idea of necessity, or necessity is nothing but that determination of thought to pass from cause to effects and effects to causes, according to their experienc’d union.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“It was a time of madness, the sort of mad-hysteria that always presages war. There seems to be nothing left but war—when any population in any sort of a nation gets violently angry, civilization falls down and religion forsakes its hold on the consciences of human kind in such times of public madness.”
—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)