The issue, however, isn't just about who foots the bill for emergency provisions. There's a bigger tension in the Katrina Migration--one that is only starting to percolate. It has to do with priority-setting. Even before the hurricane, many of the evacuees were big consumers of Louisiana's and Mississippi's government-subsidized social services. The terrible choice sheltering states are faced with is who to serve first: Katrina's victims or their own poor?
For example, many of the 15,000-plus evacuees in Tennessee will be eligible for TennCare, the state's Medicaid program. This is despite the fact that Governor Phil Bredesen, in order to save money, recently tossed 200,000 poor Tennesseeans from TennCare's rolls.
Seattle-area housing authorities are scrambling to find public housing for some of the 2,000 evacuees arriving in Washington State. Yet the King County Housing Authority purged the names of 4,000 locals from its waiting list in May, and the Seattle Housing Authority closed its waiting list in 2003. "I think there is a lot of concern about pitting poor people against poor people," Seattle Public Housing Authority spokeswoman Virginia Felton told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "Our hope would be we are not asked to do that."
School districts that have struggled to meet the standards of the federal No Child Left Behind law are getting hit, too. They now face the prospect of educating dozens, hundreds or thousands of students who are mostly poor, and likely traumatized.
Everyone seems to hope that these dislocations and challenges will be temporary as evacuees return home. It'll be a long time before we know if that's true.
In the meantime, states that have selflessly opened their hearts and coffers have also opened themselves to a really difficult question: Whose poor should stand at the front of the social service line: ours or theirs?
