Flooded Communities: Explaining Local Reactions to the Post-Katrina Migrants

This article uses the post-Katrina migration as an exogenous shock to test theories of racial threat while minimizing concerns about selection bias. Drawing in part on a new survey of 3,879 respondents, it demonstrates that despite the national concern about issues of race and poverty following Katrina, people in communities that took in evacuees became less supportive of spending to help the poor and African Americans. The results suggest a novel hypothesis that threatened responses to newcomers hinge on both local conditions and the frames that develop around their arrival.