Need and Citizenship after Disaster

Abstract

This paper analyzes the delivery of assistance for displaced people after Hurricane Katrina. Assistance can be understood as part of social welfare assistance in the United States. It is part of the social welfare apparatus in structure, and in how recipients experienced it. The “top tier” of social welfare assistance is available on the basis of claims that a person has worked and contributed to the American economy. However, displacement rather than the work of citizens was the point of access to assistance after Hurricane Katrina. Although humanitarian assistance for internally displaced persons has an international grounding, citizenship was central to evacuees’ understanding of why they merited decent treatment. The term “internally displaced person” was not in widespread use, and to receive assistance as a refugee implied being treated disrespectfully. Although for recipients citizenship was key to assistance, analyses of migration are illuminating in (1) the delivery of casework services, which relied on models from services for refugees; and (2) the uncertain sense of home and return common to people displaced after Hurricane Katrina, an understanding that is also common among migrants. The analysis in this paper relies on interviews with 90 people who were displaced after the storm; some had been resettled by a government airplane without being told where they were going, and others chose where to go. Studying assistance from multiple perspectives, including how assistance is structured and how recipients experience it, illuminates multiple meanings concerning what justifies compensation in the American social welfare state. Drawing upon scholarship concerning citizenship and engagement with the law will prove useful given the expectation that displacement-inducing hazards will increase.