Arab Americans

Arab Americans, those of Arab descent who share common language and heritage, can be traced to geographic areas outside the United States that encompass 22 countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and southwestern Asia. Arabs, primarily Christians, immigrated from Syria and other Arab countries to the United States in the 1880s during the period of the Ottoman Empire. They [Page 266]worked as petit merchants and were illiterate in both Arabic and English.

A second wave of Arab immigrants, primarily Muslims, arrived after World War II. Since the 1940s and 1950s many Arabs arrived in the United States seeking education and economic opportunities, and most of them remained in the new homeland. Palestinians immigrated to the United States in great waves, especially during the displacement policy of the late 1930s and 1940s. However, the racial hierarchy in the United States and the political system that maintained it proved to be a grave hindrance to Arab immigrant assimilation until the 1940s. By the 1960s, several factors facilitated the rapid immigration of Arabs to the United States, including the Immigration Act of 1965, which eliminated restrictions on immigration; the Israeli-Arab war of 1967; and other conflicts in the Middle East.

The population of Arab immigrants in 1990 was 860,354. It reached 1,250,000 in 2000, an increase of 38 percent. By 2010, the population reached 1,680,000 million. More than 82 percent of Arabs in the United States are U.S. citizens. Despite the rapid growth of Arab Americans, they still make up less than half of 1 percent of the overall U.S. population, which, according to the 2010 census numbered 308,745,538 in 2010.

It is important to note that census data on Americans of Arab descent are classified either as “White” or “Other” with reference to their ethnicity or ancestry. However, there is no box for Arab Americans in the ethnicity section as there is for Asians or Hispanics. Thus, about 80 percent of Arabs are classified as white, while 17 percent are classified as white and another race.

Further, the U.S. census does not classify Arabs as a minority group. Yet many Arabs who have recently immigrated to the United States often tend to associate themselves with American minorities. Some authorities state that the data from “ancestry” responses still undercount the Arab American population, which, they argue, has climbed to almost 3.5 or 4 million.

Arab Americans live in all 50 states: 26 percent reside in the northeast, 24 percent in the midwest, 27 percent in the south, and 23 percent in the West. Arab Americans live mostly in California, Michigan, New York, Florida, Texas, New Jersey, Illinois, Ohio, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. However, the majority of Arab Americans are concentrated in metropolitan areas such as Detroit (mainly Dearborn, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit), Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New Jersey. According to the American Community Survey (One-Year Estimates) conducted in 2010, Dearborn, in the Detroit metropolitan area, has the largest proportion or concentration of Arab Americans in the United States, accounting for nearly 41.7 percent (40,788 people) of the city's population in 2010. Comparatively, Arab Americans represent 0.9 percent of the population of New York and 1.1 percent of Los Angeles.

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