Arab Americans

Arab Americans ( or ) are Americans who trace ancestry to any of the various waves of immigrants from the Arabic-speaking countries. In the United States census, Arabs are racially classified as White Americans which is defined as "A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa".

According to the 2010 United States census, there are 1,698,570 Arab Americans in the United States. 290,893 persons defined themselves as simply ''Arab'', and a further 224,241 as ''Other Arab''. Other groups on the 2010 census are listed by nation of origin, and some may or may not be Arabs, or regard themselves as Arabs. The largest subgroup is by far the Lebanese Americans, with 501,907, followed by; Egyptian Americans with 190,078, Syrian Americans with 187,331, Iraqi Americans with 105,981, Moroccan Americans with 101,211, Palestinian Americans with 85,186, and Jordanian Americans with 61,664. Approximately 1/4 of all Arab Americans claimed two ancestries. A number of these ancestries are considered undercounted, given the nature of Ottoman immigration to the US during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

A number of ethnic and ethnoreligious groups in West Asia and North Africa that lived in majority Arab countries and are now resident in the United States are ''not'' always classified as Arabs but some may claim an Arab identity or a dual Arab/non-Arab identity; they include Assyrians, Jews (in particular Mizrahi Jews, some Sephardi Jews), Copts, Kurds, Iraqi Turkmens, Mandeans, Circassians, Shabaki, Armenians, Greeks, Italians, Yazidis, Persians, Kawliya/ Romani, Syrian Turkmens, Berbers, and Nubians.

Population

The majority of Arab Americans, around 62%, originate from the region of the Levant, which includes Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, although overwhelmingly from Lebanon. The remainder are made up of those from Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Iraq, Libya, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and other Arab nations.

There are nearly 3.5 million Arab Americans in the United States according to The Arab American Institute. Arab Americans live in all 50 states and in Washington, D.C., and 94% reside in the metropolitan areas of major cities. According to the 2010 US census, the city with the largest percentage of Arab Americans is Dearborn, Michigan, a southwestern suburb of Detroit, at nearly 40%. The Detroit metropolitan area is home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans (403,445), followed by the New York City Combined Statistical Area (371,233), Los Angeles (308,295), San Francisco Bay Area (250,000), Chicago (176,208), and the Washington, D.C., area (168,208). This information is reportedly based upon survey findings but is contradicted by information posted on the Arab American Institute website itself, which states that California as a whole only has 272,485, and Michigan as a whole only 191,607. The 2010 American Community Survey information, from the American Factfinder website, gives a figure of about 168,000 for Michigan.

Sorting by American states, according to the 2000 US census, 48% of the Arab American population, 576,000, reside in California, Michigan, New York, Florida, and New Jersey, respectively; these 5 states collectively have 31% of the net US population. Five other states – Illinois, Texas, Ohio, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania – report Arab American populations of more than 40,000 each. Also, the counties which contained the greatest proportions of Arab Americans were in California, Michigan, New York, Florida, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

The cities with 100,000 or more in population with the highest percentages of Arabs are Sterling Heights, Michigan 3.69%; Jersey City, New Jersey 2.81%; Warren, Michigan 2.51%; Allentown, Pennsylvania 2.45%; Burbank, California 2.39% and nearby Glendale, California 2.07%; Livonia, Michigan 1.94%; Arlington County, Virginia 1.77%; Paterson, New Jersey 1.69%.

Bayonne, New Jersey, a city of 73,000, reported an Arab American population of 17.0% in the 2020 US census.

Arab American ethnic groups

Arab population by state (2010)

The US Census Bureau calculates the number of Arab Americans based on the number of people who claimed at least one Arab ancestry as one of their two ancestries. The Arab American Institute surveys the number of people of Arab descent in the US, regardless of the number of people who claimed Arab descent in the census.

Religious background

According to the Arab American Institute based on the Zogby International Survey in 2002, the breakdown of religious affiliation among persons originating from Arab countries is as follows:

* 63% Christian
** 35% Roman/Eastern Catholic, including Roman Catholic, Maronite and Melkite
** 18% Orthodox, including Antiochian, Syrian, Greek, and Coptic
** 10% Protestant
* 24% Muslim, including Sunni, Shia, and Druze
* 13% other or no affiliation

The percentage of Arab Americans who are Muslim has increased in recent years because most new Arab immigrants tend to be Muslim. In the past 10 years, most Arab immigrants were Muslim as compared to 15 to 30 years ago when they were mostly Christian. This stands in contrast to the first wave of Arab immigration to the US between the late 19th and early 20th centuries when almost all immigrants were Christians. Those Palestinians often Eastern Orthodox, otherwise Catholic and a few Episcopalians. A small number are Protestant adherents, either having joined a Protestant denomination after immigrating to the US or being from a family that converted to Protestantism while still living in the Eastern Mediterranean (European and American Protestant missionaries were fairly commonplace in the Levant in the late 19th and early 20th centuries).

Arab Christians, especially from Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, continued to immigrate to the US in the 2000s and form new enclaves and communities across the country.

The US is the second largest home of Druze communities outside the Middle East after Venezuela (60,000). According to some estimates there are about 30,000 to 50,000 Druzes in the US, with the largest concentration in Southern California. Most Druze immigrated to the US from Lebanon and Syria.

The New York City metropolitan area has a large population of Arab Jews and Mizrahi Jews. New York City and its suburbs in New Jersey have sizable Syrian Sephardi populations. Syrian Jews and other Jews from Arab countries may or may not identify as Arab Americans. When Syrian Jews first began to arrive in New York City during the late 1800s and early 1900s, Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews on the Lower East Side sometimes disdained their Syrian co-coreligionists as ''Arabische Yidden'', Yiddish for "Arab Jews". Some Ashkenazim doubted whether Sephardi or Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East were Jewish at all. In response, some Syrian Jews who were deeply proud of their ancient Jewish heritage, derogatorily dubbed Ashkenazi Jews as "J-Dubs", a reference to the first and third letters of the English word "Jew". In the 1990 US census, there were 11,610 Arab Jews in New York City, comprising 23 percent of the total Arab population of the city. Arab Jews in the city sometimes face anti-Arab racism. After the September 11 attacks, some Arab Jews in New York City were subjected to arrest and detention because they were suspected to be Islamist terrorists.

Arab American identity

In 2012, prompted in part by post-9/11 discrimination, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee petitioned the Department of Commerce's Minority Business Development Agency to designate the MENA populations as a minority/disadvantaged community. Following consultations with MENA organizations, the Census Bureau announced in 2014 that it would establish a new MENA ethnic category for populations from West Asia, North Africa or the Arab world, separate from the white classification that these populations had previously sought in 1909. The expert groups, including some Jewish organizations, felt that the earlier white designation no longer accurately represents MENA identity, so they lobbied for a distinct categorization. The 2020 census did not include a separate MENA race category and collected detailed ethnicity information.

In the 2015 National Content Test (NCT) for the 2020 Census, the sampling strata for the new MENA category includes the Census Bureau's working classification of 19 MENA groups, as well as Sudanese, Djiboutian, Somali, Mauritanian, Armenian, Cypriot, Afghan, Iranian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian groups.

On 28 March 2024, the Office of Management and Budget published revisions to Statistical Policy Directive No. 15: Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity that included the addition of "Middle Eastern or North African" to the race and/or ethnicity categories.

The Arab American Institute and other groups have noted that there was a rise in hate crimes targeting the Arab American community as well as people perceived as Arab/Muslim after the September 11 attacks and the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq.

A new Zogby Poll International found that there are 3.5 million Americans who were identified as "Arab-Americans", or Americans of ancestry belonging to one of the 23 UN member countries of the Arab World (these are not necessarily therefore Arabs). Poll finds that, overall, a majority of those identifying as Arab Americans are Lebanese Americans (largely as a result of being the most numerous group). The Paterson, New Jersey

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