Armenian Americans

Migration and History

The major wave of Armenian immigration dates to the 1890s, driven by large-scale massacres of ethnic Armenian Christians by Islamic Turkish nationalists, who killed nearly 300,000 Armenians during 1894–95. Strong anti-Armenian sentiments stemmed from their status as both a religious minority and the high proportion of wealthy entrepreneurs within the Armenian population in lands under Ottoman rule. More than 60,000 Armenians fled to the United States between 1890 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Two more waves of genocide in 1915–18 and 1920–22 resulted in the massacre of approximately 1 million ethnic Armenians within the Ottoman Empire and diminished the geographic distribution of Armenians to the area around Constantinople. Nearly 31,000 Armenians who escaped the Turkish death throes fled to the United States between 1920 and 1924. Most of these early Armenians settled in New York City and Boston, where many became concentrated in the carpet industry. Other Armenian communities emerged within Chicago and Detroit. However, the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 severely limited immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The 1924 act reduced Armenian immigration to an annual quota limit of 150 persons.

The Immigration Act of 1965 overturned the exclusionary quotas of the 1924 law, resulting in an increase in Armenian immigration. During the 1980s, for example, more than 60,000 Armenians immigrated to the United States. Since the 1970s, the majority of Armenian newcomers have established residence in California. Fresno and Los Angeles each have large Armenian communities. In October 2000 the City of Los Angeles officially designated a neighborhood in East Hollywood “Little Armenia,” with a street sign bearing the moniker posted at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vermont Avenue.

The Armenian Genocide

The Turkish massacres of the late 19th and early 20th centuries remain an important subject for many Armenian Americans. Protests aimed at raising public awareness of these massacres and designed to pressure the Turkish government to officially acknowledge this genocide have occurred in several U.S. cities with significant Armenian communities, such as Los Angeles, Fresno, New York City, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. Demonstrators have called on President Barack Obama to officially declare the massacres acts of “genocide,” thereby placing greater pressure from the U.S. government on the Turkish government to acknowledge the atrocities.

Several celebrities have taken up this cause, including George Clooney and Kim Kardashian. Clooney, his father, and four members of Congress were arrested at a March 2012 protest [Page 281]sponsored by the Armenian National Committee of America, while Kardashian blogged in

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