The History of Arab-American Immigration

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, and to end the show today, we now turn to Arab-American Heritage Month declared by President Biden in 2021. Your family's immigration to America story, if you are an Arab-American, an immigrant yourself or with parents or grandparents or earlier ancestors from an Arab nation, an Arabic-speaking nation, tell us your family immigration story to America at 212-433-WNYC, our phones are open at 212-433-9692.

Some background. Back in 2021, President Joe Biden revoked former president Donald Trump's so-called Muslim ban. Remember that? Signed in 2017 by Trump, the executive order severely restricted immigration or the ability to claim refugee status from seven predominantly Muslim countries, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. On the heels of revoking that ban, President Biden recognized April as National Arab American Heritage Month. Here's a clip from then of white house spokesman, Ned Price.

Ned Price: Americans of Arab heritage are very much a part of the fabric of this nation, and Arab-Americans have contributed in every field and profession. Many of them, in fact, serve here at the State Department and throughout the interagency, and their careers are as diverse as their backgrounds. We mark National Arab American Heritage Month noting these contributions that are as old as America itself.

Brian Lehrer: In fact, Arab-American communities have a long history in the United States and includes everyone from or with relatives from 22 Arabic-speaking countries in North Africa and the Middle East, a lot of the same countries from whom Americans will now have their own category in the census, Middle Eastern or North African, as we discussed on the show earlier this month. There was no category for anybody in those categories in the past. They were just considered white. Now there's going to be North Africa and Middle East as a category on the census for what your heritage is.

Joining us now to help tell some of the history of Arab-American immigration is Maya Berry, Executive Director of the Arab-American Institute, a non-profit, nonpartisan, national civil rights advocacy organization. Maya, thanks so much for joining us for this. Welcome to WNYC.

Maya Berry: Thank you, Brian, for having us, and thank you for covering this topic.

Brian Lehrer: Again, listeners, we have some minutes for phone calls here. If you're Arab-American, what do you know about your family history? Where did they come from? Where in the United States did they call home? If many people know Chinatown or Little Italy, what are some Arab-American neighborhoods that could be better known as American community stories too? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Tell us something about your Arab-American immigration story or neighborhood. 212-433-9692. Maya, I have read that the first generation of Arab-Americans, what's considered the first generation, came between 1880 and 1924, which we also call the Ellis Island era. You want to talk about that period in general?

Maya Berry: Yes, it's the American story. The first major wave of Arab immigrants came during that period, at the same time that the United States saw 20 million immigrants from around the globe. From our perspective at the time, folks were coming here from primarily, present-day Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, and they were really motivated by economic reasons.

They came here leaving the Ottoman Empire at the time and seeking increased business opportunities and the ability to be able to send resources back to their families back home. They settled in industrial cities like Toledo and Dearborn, Detroit, New York, Boston, Pittsburgh. It's really the very standard American story in terms of immigrants at the time.

Brian Lehrer: By 1924, I see approximately 200,000 Arabs were living in the United States. There was also a smaller subset of Arabs than the one from that area that you described as greater Syria under the Ottoman Empire. It's such an interesting history, actually, of how many times what we think of as the Arab world has been occupied by how many different empires and how many times the borders have been drawn. What we now think of as Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, or Palestine, all called Syria under the Ottoman Empire around the turn of the 20th century.

By 1924, approximately 200,000 Arabs were living in the United States. From there, then a smaller subset, from what I've read, coming from Yemen, Morocco, Egypt. Do we know some of their stories and neighborhoods? There was a Little Syria in New York, Lower Manhattan, right? I don't know if enough of a population still exists to call it that.

Maya Berry: Oh, regrettably, it doesn't anymore. Little Syria is an exceptionally important story in the Arab-American experience. We call it the mother colony. It was really the first place where you had an established ethnic community in a very real and meaningful way. You had Arabic language newspapers, you had Arabic restaurants and grocery stores. A lot of the folks who came in that first wave made their money as peddlers. You had the actual factories or places where those goods were provided located in that lower Manhattan section of Little Syria. It was an incredible place.

Many of your listeners certainly know about Kahlil Gibran, the incredible poet. That was his neighborhood, that was home. Ameen Rihani, who published the first Arab-American novel called The Book of Khalid, that was his neighborhood. It was just an incredibly vibrant and beautiful community. With development comes changes, and we saw the development of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel that displaced all those residents. Today, one of the original churches, St. George, has a historic landmark, but there's not much else there that's reminiscent of that area. It's literally one of the foundations of our story in the United States.

Brian Lehrer: We just got a beautiful text from a listener who wrote, my grandmother and grandfather immigrated from Syria in the early '30s. My grandmother is 101 years old and still remembers the address of her first Lower Manhattan apartment. It's a crepe shop now.

Maya Berry: Oh, that's wonderful. That's incredible. That's the story, that right there.

Brian Lehrer: Adam in New Brunswick, you're on WNYC. Hi, Adam. Thanks for calling in.

Adam: Hi, Brian. Well, first off, thank you for doing this, and it's really exciting to hear about the early history of Arab immigration. My story starts with my dad and uncle immigrating from Cairo, Egypt, in the late '90s and early 2000s. Of course, like many other immigrants seeking economic opportunities and whatnot. They couldn't have picked a worse time for Arab discrimination and bigotry during 9/11.

It got really bad for them to a point where my dad started having to go by a nickname to get jobs, and my uncle had to change his name from Osama to Sam to even get a look from workplaces to the point where-- I think at that point the Justice Department and the FBI were doing mass interrogations of Arabs who were recently immigrated here and almost got deported. Definitely, it was very tough for them but persevered and happy to be here now.

Brian Lehrer: What was the reason for coming to America in your family's case?

Adam: Actually it was just like many other people's stories where they're looking for economic opportunity. Egypt in the '90s wasn't particularly great for prosperity. My father had lost his father early on so it was just my grandmother all alone, raising four boys. My dad and his twin brother, my uncle, were the two eldest and they were designated to be the people who were to set out and make money, make names for themselves to try to send money back to their family in Egypt. That's a common theme for many of my Arab friends and why their families immigrated here.

Brian Lehrer: Adam, thank you very much. We could fill in the blank and add like 100 different countries on earth, Maya, and tell the same story, right?

Maya Berry: Oh, absolutely. Adam's family story fits in that we simplify this in order to understand it differently. It's the fourth major wave of immigration which came in the 1990s. We saw an increase from folks from both the Arab world as we know it and Africa, so when he talks about coming from North Africa, in Egypt. You really did see an increase in the climate as Adam correctly talks about it. Our community has had an interesting relationship with our government from early on, and it predates 9/11, regrettably. We can talk about Abscam, we can talk about Operation Boulder. There are different ways in which our government has securitized its relationship with us.

In the post 9/11 environment, the kinds of things that Adam is talking about were really incredibly harmful and hurtful to communities across the country. New York saw it in a very real and meaningful way when we saw NYPD's massive profiling project that took place there. It's an unfortunate part of our experience here in the US. At the same time, it really does speak to the community's resilience and its commitment to political empowerment, because those things are very connected. It is the way in which we protect ourselves from a disparate impact on some of those civil rights and civil liberties issues that have come up.

Brian Lehrer: Let me try to squeeze two more caller stories in here before we run out of time. Jasmine in Garden City, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jasmine. We've got about a minute for you.

Jasmine: Hi. Okay. Yes. My name is Jasmine, and my grandfather left Jerusalem to Baghdad where my mother was born in 1952, and then they went to Beirut. Both my parents immigrated to the US in 1976 from Beirut, Lebanon because of the Lebanese war, and then I was born in 1982. I'm first generation Arab-American. I can't tell you how much it means to me to hear these stories being told and to just have these segments on the air because-- and even with the census change and the recognition this month, it feels very empowering to be seen and to be heard, and--

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much. I'm going to leave it there so I can get one more person's story on. It's going to be Tina in Brooklyn. Tina, you're on WNYC. Thank you so much for calling in.

Tina: Thank you so much, Brian, for taking my call. I'm a huge fan. My family came over, my grandfather, great-grandfather, grandmother, et cetera, in 1915 to escape the Armenian genocide. They were forced to speak Arabic and Turkish, were not allowed to speak their mother tongue. We of course had left many people along the way in Marseille, in England, but ultimately, my father, a first generation Armenian, had to grow up in a Jewish-Greek neighborhood in Detroit, put himself through school. I'm second generation. The only other who has a higher education, and I just want to say, so great to see that they're putting Middle Eastern as an identity and I don't have to pick other.

Brian Lehrer: Tina, thank you very much. So Maya, in our last minute, considering Islamophobia, anti-Arab sentiment, they're not the same thing. There are a lot of Arab Christians as well. What's the future of Arab immigration to this country? Do you think there's a lot of demand?

Maya Berry: I do, and I would say that it's important for us to appreciate your point about not conflating the ethnicity with the faith. The majority of Arab-Americans are actually Christian, and a plurality of American Muslims here in the United States are Black. It's part of the importance of understanding the pride that Arab-Americans have in their ethnicity and the importance of responding to the anti-Arab bigotry that we see play out is to have a deeper understanding of those issues.

In terms of-- Look, I think that we are a nation of immigrants and we continue to be, and we, as an Arab-American community, we have made tremendous contributions here in the United States. We have great pride about our public service, about our work in every field you can think of from the original Yemeni farm workers in California to the Palestinian refugees that came in during a restricted period, but who provided so much as professionals and academics to the newer immigrants that we see coming today from areas like Somalia and Sudan and continued from Syria. It's an incredibly rich and diverse community, racially diverse, ethnically diverse. I think it's the American story and will continue to be, and we're grateful for what you're doing because there really is misinformation and stereotyping in [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. That's going to have to be the last word because we're flat out of time. Maya Berry, Executive Director of the Arab American Institute. Thank you very, very much.

Maya Berry: Thank you, Brian.

 

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