1 in 5 Unemployed - With 1 in 5 in the city of New Orleans unemployed, according to my now very beat up U.S. World News & Report magazine (which I can't find anywhere online, strangely), how can we allow migrant workers to come gobble up all these high demand jobs? With Dilma's story of $10/hour for cleaning hotel rooms and the McDonald's offers of weekly bonuses, what's the deal? But then Flo insightfully reminded us of who are the people who have not returned to the city. The wage earners have not been able to come back yet. The bite stings at both ends. These people cannot come home to rebuild their lives yet, and they are missing these job opportunities. Why can't they come back? As Ben at St. Augustine Church put it, what do they have to come back to? No community, no support, no groceries...even though they want to come back. If you're neighbors aren't back and no one's around, who'd want to live and rebuild with that?

Here's an interesting piece from the Nation called "Purging the Poor from New Orleans" dated September 2005. Not much has changed. Recall institutional racism.