Lachance takes the ten thousand Saint-Domingue refugees expelled from Cuba who reached New Orleans in 1809, a number close to the city's whole population, as a case for testing what receiving societies predict about newcomers against what actually follows.

The arrivals divided roughly evenly among whites, free people of color and the enslaved, and drew the mixed response refugees usually draw: humanitarian argument on one side, fear of alien ideas and of insurrection on the other. Anglo-Americans warned above all that the influx would fasten a French character on the territory for good.

That prediction proved half right. French speakers did remain a majority of the white population for about two decades, and the refugees reinforced the community in numbers and institutions, but the ratio was already so lopsided that preponderance would have lasted anyway. Little further migration followed, so attrition set in; by the 1830s spouses of refugee origin had dwindled while arrivals from France rose sharply.