- Apr 15
- 16 min read
Updated: May 7
IMMIGRANT CITIES
New Orleans
Ports have always been places of arrival. Built on trade with the world, port cities attract people from all parts of the globe. The communities that take root in them are more cosmopolitan and outward-looking than those of inland towns.
The Immigrant Times has launched a new series, Immigrant Cities, which explores how immigration has influenced some of the world’s major cities: their neighbourhoods, cultures, conflicts, and characters. We start with Buenos Aires, New Orleans, Marseille, Rotterdam and Liverpool
Between 1832 and 1838, Irish labourers excavated the New Basin Canal, a three-mile waterway connecting New Orleans to Lake Pontchartrain, carved through swampland by hand. After Hurricane Katrina, thousands of Latino construction workers arrived to help rebuild New Orleans. About 25 per cent of the entire reconstruction workforce was undocumented. A monument along the Mississippi River honours their contributions. The Haitian refugees brought with them Vodou religious traditions rooted in West African, the Creole language, and Caribbean music and dance.
Introduction
New Orleans, the most un-American city in the US
April 2026: There is a traditional American immigration narrative that does not match the experience of New Orleans. In this well-known story, a city is built by Anglo-Protestant settlers and later reshaped by waves of immigrants, including Irish, Italian, Chinese, and Eastern European communities, who integrate into the existing society and, over time, gradually and often painfully become American.
New Orleans has a distinct history and character. Founded by the French in 1718, it was governed by Spain for four decades, briefly reverted to French control, and was ultimately sold to the United States in 1803. By that time, its unique identity had already been established, and its residents regarded the arriving Americans with polite disdain.
The city the United States inherited was Catholic, francophone, multiracial, and influenced by Caribbean culture as much as by continental influences. It maintained its own legal code, derived from French and Spanish civil law, and still in use today, representing the only such system within the United States. Additionally, New Orleans possessed its own cuisine, music, racial taxonomy, and unique perspective on urban life.
The outcome shows that New Orleans is better described as the northernmost Caribbean city rather than the southernmost American one. Its story of immigration cannot be told through the usual narrative of arrival and assimilation, as the categories themselves differ. The city was established on the backs of forced African labour, shaped by a devastating Caribbean revolution, and inhabited by Irish navvies, German merchants, and Sicilian fishermen.
Its musical and spiritual identity has been profoundly shaped by enslaved individuals and their descendants. Moreover, the city was recently rebuilt following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, mainly by Central American workers whose presence is currently challenged by federal immigration enforcement. Each layer of this historical complexity persists within the city, evident through its music, visible in its cuisine, and experienced through its political landscape.
New Orleans today has a population of around 370,000, down from before Katrina, an event that permanently displaced tens of thousands of residents. It is mainly African American, about 60 per cent, with a Hispanic community that has grown from five per cent in 2000 to approximately 14 per cent now.
The colonial period
A city created by forced labour
New Orleans was founded in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, a French-Canadian colonial administrator who selected a site on a bend of the Mississippi River for strategic reasons: easy access to the Gulf of Mexico, control of the river trade, and a natural levee just high enough to build upon. The city was named after the Duke of Orléans, regent of France, and was laid out in the grid pattern that still characterises the French Quarter today.
The founding myth of intentional European settlement conceals a harsher reality: voluntary migration from France was slow and met with significant reluctance during the colonial period. The colony proved to be unprofitable, the climate was lethal, and the reports arriving in France did not bode well. The Company of the West, which possessed the colonial charter, resorted to transporting convicts, vagrants, and destitute women to populate the settlement. What genuinely contributed to the development of New Orleans was not European ambition but African labour. Enslaved Africans were brought to Louisiana from the 1710s onward, predominantly from Senegambia, the Bight of Benin, and the Congo region, under the terms of the French Code Noir, the legal framework governing slavery in French colonies.
This account does not depict a narrative of immigration in any comfortable sense. The enslaved individuals were not migrants; they were captives. Nonetheless, their specific origins significantly influenced the development of New Orleans.
The Senegambian musicians and the Fon-speaking practitioners of Vodun from the Bight of Benin, along with the Congolese Catholics who arrived in Louisiana, introduced cultural traditions that endured, evolved, and ultimately contributed substantially to the city's distinct character: the polyrhythmic drumming that continued at Congo Square on Sundays; the syncretic religious practices that merged Catholic saints with West African spirits; and the musical legacy that directly impacted jazz and blues. Fundamentally, the culture of New Orleans is chiefly an African creation, forged through bondage, yet not broken by it.
The Spanish period, which lasted from 1762 to 1800, adopted a different approach to immigration. The Spanish Crown regarded the population as a strategic asset and actively recruited settlers to strengthen its control over the colony. Among those who arrived were the Isleños, Canary Islanders, who came in four waves between 1778 and 1783 to settle the Louisiana bayous south and east of New Orleans. About 2,000 of them established communities along Bayou Terre-aux-Bœufs, Bayou Lafourche, and the banks of the Mississippi. Their goal was to build a loyal Catholic population and create a buffer zone against British expansion. They achieved the first aim and were largely forgotten concerning the second. Notably, their descendants, a community of fisherfolk and trappers in the parishes south of New Orleans, preserved an archaic form of Spanish for two centuries, and small numbers of Isleño Spanish speakers could still be found in the 20th century.
The city acquired by the United States in 1803 had a population of around 8,000: approximately 4,000 white residents, 1,300 free people of colour, and 2,700 enslaved individuals. It was, in essence, a miniature reflection of the diverse multiracial society that would shape its history.
The largest slave market in America
As New Orleans expanded in the early 19th century into the commercial heart of the American South, it also became the largest domestic slave-trading city in North America. This is a fact that the city’s own historical mythology has sometimes preferred to hide behind the romance of Creole culture and jazz, but it remains central to understanding what New Orleans truly is.
The internal slave trade, defined as the buying and selling of enslaved individuals within the United States subsequent to the abolition of the international trade in 1808, was a widespread and brutal mechanism of enforced internal migration. Enslaved persons were led in coffles from the upper South, including Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, to plantations cultivating cotton and sugar in Louisiana and the Deep South. New Orleans functioned as the principal hub of this trade. By the 1840s, approximately fifty slave-trading firms operated within the city. The St. Louis Hotel on Royal Street hosted auctions in its rotunda; the Exchange on Magazine Street was another prominent venue. For visitors to antebellum New Orleans, the slave market was among the city’s most notable spectacles, frequently mentioned in travellers’ accounts alongside the opera house and renowned restaurants.
The people sold there came from across the American South, torn from their families and communities, and the scale of this forced migration was staggering. Historians estimate that in the decades before the Civil War, around one million enslaved people were moved from the upper South to the lower South through sale, a displacement larger than any voluntary immigration wave of the same period. New Orleans was the primary market through which this movement was channelled. The enslaved who passed through it were not immigrants in any sense, but they were the people whose labour built Louisiana’s sugar and cotton economy, and whose cultural resilience gave the city its most enduring gifts.
The Haitian Revolution and the emergence of Creole New Orleans
In 1791, the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue, the French colony occupying the western third of the island of Hispaniola, now Haiti, rose in the largest and most successful slave rebellion in history. The uprising that began on the night of 22 August 1791 developed into a thirteen-year revolution that overthrew the colonial system, abolished slavery, and in 1804 established the first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere. It was an upheaval that shook the entire Atlantic world, and its effects on New Orleans were more immediate and significant than on any other city outside the Caribbean.
The revolution prompted waves of refugees to flee. White planters escaped as violence spread; free people of colour faced impossible situations as the conflict deepened; the enslaved were torn between seeking freedom and staying in captivity. Many initially fled to Cuba, Jamaica, and other Caribbean islands. However, as Napoleon’s wars in Europe destabilised these refuge points, with France invading Spain in 1808 and Cuba expelling its French-speaking residents in retaliation, a final mass exodus crossed the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans.
Between May 1809 and early 1810, over 10,000 Saint-Domingue refugees arrived in New Orleans within nine months, doubling the city’s population. This wave was remarkable: the arrivals were roughly evenly split into three groups, about 2,700 whites, 3,100 free people of colour, and 3,200 enslaved individuals, mirroring the three-tier racial hierarchy of the society they fled. In total, between the 1790s and 1810, between 15,000 and 20,000 Saint-Domingue refugees settled in Louisiana, most of them in the Crescent City.
The Haitian refugees also reinforced New Orleans’s French language and Catholic culture precisely when Anglo-American pressure was trying to weaken them. They preserved the city's Francophone identity into the mid-19th century. Furthermore, they brought with them the cultural heritage of Saint-Domingue: Vodou religious traditions rooted in West African Fon and Ewe spirituality, the Creole language, and Caribbean music and dance. The Voodoo practice, which became one of New Orleans’s most famous cultural exports and is most famously associated with the legend of the Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveau, herself almost certainly of Haitian origin, was a direct consequence of this migration.
A concerning legal footnote accompanies the arrival of 1809. France had officially abolished slavery within its colonies in 1794. Consequently, a significant number of the ‘enslaved’ individuals who reached New Orleans had been legally free according to French law, only to be re-enslaved upon entering American territory, where slavery was permitted, and the Louisiana territorial government showed little interest in scrutinising the matter closely. Some individuals arrived with documentation of their freedom that was disregarded. The revolution, which had ostensibly liberated them, effectively subjected them to a different form of bondage.
The 19th-century port
The arrivals of Irish, Germans, and Sicilians
Between 1820 and 1860, over 550,000 immigrants arrived in the United States via the port of New Orleans, ranking second only to New York in volume. The city’s position at the mouth of the Mississippi, its function as the commercial gateway to the American interior, and its established Catholic heritage made it a natural destination for the European poor who were being displaced from Ireland, the German states, and later Italy.
The Irish
Irish immigrants had been arriving in New Orleans since the Spanish colonial period, but the flow intensified with the Great Famine of the 1840s. By 1850, one in five city residents was Irish-born. They were predominantly Catholic and mostly poor, and they found in New Orleans a more welcoming destination than Protestant New England: the city’s Catholicism provided them with an institutional foothold that eased their arrival, and the demand for unskilled labour was insatiable.
They undertook the most challenging work. Between 1832 and 1838, Irish labourers excavated the New Basin Canal, a three-mile waterway connecting the city to Lake Pontchartrain, carved through swampland by hand. Estimates of the death toll among the canal workers range from 8,000 to 20,000; most were buried in unmarked graves along the route. A Kilkenny marble Celtic cross was erected in their memory in 1990.
The survivors settled in the Irish Channel, a working-class district near the river in what was then the separate city of Lafayette, later incorporated into New Orleans. Their Catholic faith, labour union organisation, and dominance of the city’s dockwork shaped New Orleans politics for generations. Unusually, the Irish of New Orleans also left a mark on the local accent: the broad vowels and dropped consonants of the traditional ‘Yat’ dialect of New Orleans, often compared by visitors to a Brooklyn accent, are partly attributed to Irish influence, just as the Welsh are credited with shaping the cadences of Scouse in Liverpool.
The Germans
German immigrants arrived in comparable numbers during the same period, attracted by the port trade and the agricultural land upriver along the ‘German Coast’. In the city, Germans dominated the brewing, baking, and grocery trades. Many changed their names into French or English forms to ease their acceptance in the city’s Francophone social world, and their traces in New Orleans are consequently subtler than those of the Irish. However, the German contribution to the city’s commercial and culinary life was significant, and their relatively swift integration into Creole Catholic society is a recurring pattern in New Orleans’s history: the city’s existing cultural framework absorbed newcomers more smoothly than the Anglo-Protestant cities of the north.
The Sicilians
The Italians arrived later and more dramatically. From the 1880s onwards, tens of thousands of Sicilian immigrants, driven out by poverty, the upheavals of Italian unification, and brutal taxation of the southern peasantry, transformed the lower French Quarter into what became known as ‘Little Palermo.’ By 1890, Italians owned or controlled more than 3,000 businesses in the city. They dominated the fruit trade, the docks were filled with ‘lemon boats’ from Sicily, and they spread through grocery, fishing, and small commerce. They were hardworking, Catholic, and not always welcome.
On the night of 14 March 1891, a mob of several thousand people stormed the Orleans Parish Prison and murdered eleven Italian men, most of whom were Sicilian, who had been held in connection with the killing of the city’s police chief. It was the largest mass lynching of European immigrants in American history. The men had been acquitted or their cases declared mistrials; the mob decided this was insufficient.
The victims were shot, beaten, and two were hanged from lampposts outside the prison. The international crisis that followed, during which Italy temporarily severed diplomatic relations with the United States, was resolved partly by the payment of an indemnity and partly by the institution of Columbus Day as a national holiday, designed to mollify Italian-American voters. New Orleans formally apologised for the lynching in 2019.
The Sicilian community recovered, integrated, and eventually became simply ‘white’ in the city’s racial classification. Their food, the muffuletta sandwich, and the Italian grocery traditions of the French Quarter, remain part of New Orleans’s culinary identity. The cycle of hostility followed by assimilation is, as with the Irish and Italians of Marseille and Rotterdam, a common feature of the port city’s relationship with its newcomers.
New Orleans in the 20th century
Hondurans, Vietnamese, and a new diversity
Two immigrant communities, the Hondurans and the Vietnamese, shape the history of modern New Orleans, and both have longer stories than most suppose.
The Hondurans
The link between New Orleans and Honduras begins with bananas. In the late 19th century, New Orleans was the centre of the Central American fruit trade: the United Fruit Company and the Standard Fruit Company had their headquarters in the city, with their plantations in Honduras. The ships that carried bananas north also transported Honduran workers. By the mid-20th century, a Honduran community had been established in New Orleans, initially concentrated in the Garden District and later spreading into the suburbs. Many came for education and healthcare; Catholic schools and hospitals attracted them, and they chose to stay.
The community grew through successive waves of displacement originating from Honduras itself: floods, fruit company strikes, military coups, and the widespread instability of a country heavily influenced by the same American fruit corporations that originally brought Hondurans to New Orleans. By the time Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, the metropolitan New Orleans area was home to over 100,000 people of Honduran descent, making it the largest Honduran community in the United States.
The Vietnamese
After the fall of Saigon in April 1975, Vietnamese refugees were resettled across the United States through a network of Catholic and voluntary agencies. A significant group, drawn partly by the tropical climate, partly by the Gulf Coast's fishing and shrimping industries, and partly by the city's existing Catholic infrastructure, which had welcomed immigrant communities for two and a half centuries, came to New Orleans. Catholic Charities placed the first arrivals at the Versailles Arms apartment complex in New Orleans East, a neighbourhood on the city’s eastern edge built in the 1960s and largely vacant after workers from a nearby NASA facility had departed.
The community that grew around Versailles, the neighbourhood, took on the name of the apartment complex, becoming one of the most densely populated Vietnamese enclaves in the United States, with about 14,000 residents by the early 2000s. It was centred around Mary Queen of Vietnam Church, founded in 1983 as the first Catholic parish in the United States with a majority Vietnamese congregation. Many residents worked in the fishing and shrimping industries of the Gulf; others opened restaurants, grocery stores, nail salons, and pharmacies along the commercial strip of Village de l’Est, commonly known as ‘Little Vietnam.’ The community was, by the standards of the wider city, notably self-sufficient and largely unnoticed by the rest of New Orleans.
Then came Katrina. The flooding in New Orleans East was severe, and the Versailles community was scattered along with everyone else. What happened next surprised the city. By January 2006, less than five months after the storm, more than half the neighbourhood had returned and begun rebuilding, faster than almost any other flood-damaged community in New Orleans. They came back as a group, organised through the church, financed by family networks rather than FEMA, and driven by a determination that people who had already been refugees once were not going to be refugees again.
Their return gave them a political voice they had not previously possessed. When the city’s mayor attempted to open a toxic landfill less than two miles from Versailles, a site for Katrina debris disposal, without an environmental impact study, next to the same bayou that had flooded the community, the Vietnamese residents organised, protested, and succeeded. The landfill was shut down. ‘Now,’ said Father Vien Nguyen of Mary Queen of Vietnam Church, ‘no one would dare speak about rebuilding New Orleans without mentioning our community.’
The 21st century
Hurricane Katrina and the remaking of the city
Hurricane Katrina made landfall on 29 August 2005 as one of the strongest storms to strike the United States. In New Orleans, the disaster was not the wind but the water: the levee system protecting the city failed at 53 points, flooding 80 per cent of the urban area and causing around 1,800 deaths. The flooding was most severe in the poorest, predominantly Black neighbourhoods, such as the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly, and New Orleans East, with significant demographic impacts. About 75,000 Black residents were permanently displaced from the city, scattered to Houston, Atlanta, Baton Rouge, and other places. Many never returned.
When Katrina struck, the significance of Honduran immigrants in the city’s history became impossible to ignore. Within a year of the storm, more than 10,000 Hondurans and Mexicans arrived to undertake the rebuilding work. By March 2006, nearly half of the reconstruction workforce was Latino, and over half of those workers were undocumented. The Bush administration temporarily suspended immigration regulations requiring employers to verify workers’ status, effectively issuing an informal invitation for undocumented labour to come and do what legal residents and citizens would not, or could not, do quickly.
What followed was a story of exploitation alongside contribution. Wage theft was widespread: contractors picked up workers at day-labour corners, had them gut flooded houses and rebuild entire neighbourhoods, and then refused to pay. Threats to call immigration enforcement were used as tools of coercion. The Congress of Day Labourers, the Congreso de Jornaleros, was formed in 2006 specifically to combat these practices. ‘If you took the Latino presence out,’ one activist told a reporter, ‘this city would not have recovered the way it did. There’s absolutely no way.’ A bronze monument in Crescent Park now honours the Latino workers who rebuilt New Orleans. The city that erected it would, two decades later, become the target of one of the most aggressive federal immigration enforcement operations in recent American history.
The Hispanic population of the metropolitan area roughly doubled in the decade after Katrina. Gentrification, accelerated by the storm, brought more affluent white residents into historically Black neighbourhoods, increasing property values and pushing out those who had not managed to return quickly enough to secure their homes. The city that emerged from Katrina was visibly different in its racial and economic landscape from the one that existed before.
Katrina also clearly exposed the link between vulnerability and immigration status. The communities most affected by the storm, situated in the lowest-lying areas because they were the least desirable and most affordable places to live, also had the fewest resources to recover. The Vietnamese community in Versailles recovered more quickly than nearly any other; the Honduran day labourers who rebuilt the city had no safety net at all. The monument in Crescent Park honours their contribution.
Immigration in the 21st century
The demographic landscape of New Orleans in the 2020s is shaped by all the layers described above, and it continues to evolve. The city's population is around 370,000, down from nearly 500,000 before Katrina. It is mainly African American; its Hispanic community, now making up about 14 per cent of the metropolitan area, is the fastest-growing demographic group; its Vietnamese community remains one of the largest and most cohesive in the country. The city’s foreign-born population totals approximately 27,000, a relatively modest figure compared to New York or Miami, yet it includes communities with roots dating back a century or more.
New Orleans under President Trump
The stability that immigrant communities built over decades in New Orleans has come under pressure since President Donald Trump's return to office in January 2025. The administration's campaign of aggressive immigration enforcement reached the city in December 2025, when federal agents launched a major operation across the New Orleans metropolitan area targeting undocumented residents. Businesses in immigrant-heavy neighbourhoods closed; parents kept children home from school; American citizens began carrying their passports to avoid being wrongfully detained.
The operation uncovered a longstanding tension beneath New Orleans's cosmopolitan veneer. The city, which limits cooperation between its police and federal immigration agencies, found itself in conflict with the more conservative adjacent suburbs, where local police departments have entered into agreements to support federal enforcement. The communities most impacted are predominantly the Honduran community, which, above all, facilitated New Orleans's reconstruction following Hurricane Katrina and has been an integral part of its society for over a century.
New Orleans has, after all, endured yellow fever, floods, occupation, civil war, and a hurricane that drowned 80 per cent of the city. It has a long memory and a longer history than any administration. It will remain the jewel of America’s South.
Methodology: The article draws on information from 64 Parishes (Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities); Historic New Orleans Collection; Britannica; Wikipedia; In Motion: The African American Migration Experience (NYPL); Clarion Herald; WWNO New Orleans Public Radio; NPR; NBC News; The Marshall Project; Democracy Now!; Verite News; Louisiana Illuminator; Axios; Smithsonian Magazine; History.com; American Immigration Council; PBS Independent Lens; Country Roads Magazine; Via Nola Vie; University of North Carolina Press; Re-Imagining Migration; France Amériques / BNF Patrimoine Partagé
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We launched the series Immigrant Cities in March 2026, starting with Liverpool, Rotterdam, Marseille, and New Orleans. In May, we added Buenos Aires. In the coming months, we will include other cities from Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Please contact the Editor if you would like to suggest cities with a captivating immigration history. the Editor if you would like to suggest cities with a captivating immigration history.
Further reading from the Immigrant Cities series: New Orleans || Marseille || Rotterdam || Liverpool ||
Further reading from The Immigrant Times: US cities and mayors confront Trump || Immigration detention in the US || Undocumented immigrants contribute billions ||
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