Refugees

Of course the people fleeing the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina are “refugees,” and should be referred to as such. I don’t understand what all the fuss is all about … did anyone object after Sept. 11, 2001, when the media called people living in the area of Ground Zero “refugees”?

From the Sept. 22, 2001 NYDN:

RETURNING REFUGEES SAY APTS. ROBBED
By DEREK ROSE and OWEN MORITZ DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Tenants streamed back into a Battery Park City apartment complex yesterday to find blown-out windows, doors smashed open by firefighters and jewelry and other articles missing.

Some other examples:

• “41 River Terrace, welcome home!” one of the cops told a returning refugee. (9/21 nydn)
• The firefighters who clawed through the rubble looking for their trapped brethren were replaced by construction workers. And as the refugees returned to their Battery Park City homes, they paused to watch the 18-wheelers hauling away huge pieces of the fallen giant in whose shadow they once lived. (9/24 nydn)
• Barely able to breathe, ankle-deep in lavalike powder that we later learned was building-and-body particles, we staggered two blocks south. A man pointed to another residential building, the Regatta, at 21 South End Ave. It, too, was taking in refugees. (9/19 nydn)
• Six days after a terror attack leveled the World Trade Center and sent thousands running for their lives, the refugees return today to a lower Manhattan that many of them will barely recognize. (9/17 nydn)
• World Trade Center refugee companies may have found a temporary home – where the New York Stock Exchange thought it would be going. (9/20 nydn)
• There were refugees everywhere: a long, slow motion flight from the core of the city, great strings of people putting their feet on the ground, in hopes that it, unlike the sky, was safe. And because they would be putting down their feet many times, some women stopped on Canal Street to buy $8 flip-flops, a small advantage over high-heeled shoes for such a journey. (9/12 nyt)
• The children whose parents were able to pick them up were the lucky ones. Those who remained behind were marched like a column of refugees under police escort from TriBeCa to P.S. 41 in Greenwich Village. Lunchroom workers carried little children piggyback, one mother said. (9/13 nyt)
• BATTERY Park City refugees are angry and exhausted, and we have no place to rest or find solace. (9/20 nyp)

I could give other examples, but you get the idea… And as other people have noted, “Dust Bowl refugee” was a common term in the ’30s. Woody Guthrie wrote a song by that name.

And a quick Nexis search of the Miami Herald found two dozen usages of the term “hurricane refugee” before Katrina, as in this story last year about Hurricane Jeanne: “Everyone else chugged south on Florida’s Turnpike with suitcases, children and the telltale sign of a hurricane refugee: Dogs.”

U/D: Keith Boykin has a good discussion of this issue here. Also, Eric Zorn, Adrian Walker NPR. Richard Prince, meanwhile, says the Washington Post and Miami Herald have limited the use of the word “refugees.” A contrary view can be found here and here, with more discussion here, here, here and here.