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Arab Americans Have Always Been Here

The story of my people, and my country.

Deeproots: From the late 19th century to 1920, there were at least 100,000 Syrian immigrants who came to the United States.

At the 1984 Democratic National Convention, I was given the opportunity to deliver one of the speeches nominating Jesse Jackson for president of the United States. Reverend Jackson was the first presidential candidate to affirmatively include Arab Americans in his campaign, and I was the first Arab American to speak at a national party convention. In the few minutes allotted to me, I sought to convey my community’s diversity, its progress in American life, and its political concerns. I began:

I am an Arab American…. We are steelworkers of Syrian descent in Allentown and autoworkers in Detroit. We are Yemeni farmworkers in California and the Lebanese community of Brooklyn. We are the Palestinian grocers of San Francisco. We are professionals and public servants. We are immigrants and citizens, proud of being Americans and proud of our heritage.

I am an Arab American…. We are steelworkers of Syrian descent in Allentown and autoworkers in Detroit. We are Yemeni farmworkers in California and the Lebanese community of Brooklyn. We are the Palestinian grocers of San Francisco. We are professionals and public servants. We are immigrants and citizens, proud of being Americans and proud of our heritage.

The larger story of Arab immigration to the United States, including my own family’s story, has ebbed and flowed with this country’s 250-year history. But it wasn’t until the 1880s that larger groups of Arab immigrants began to arrive in the US. Like their Southern European counterparts, they came to find employment in the mills that populated towns in New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Midwest. Most of them were from the areas known today as Syria and Lebanon, but immigration records from this period simply categorized them as “Turks” from the Ottoman Empire.

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Arabs, like other immigrant groups who came during the same period, settled in clusters in close proximity to the people they knew and built places of worship to consolidate their presence in their new neighborhoods. There were Maronite Catholic and Syrian or Greek Orthodox Christian communities throughout Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York. In the early 20th century, some of America’s first mosques were founded in Maine, Michigan, Illinois, North Dakota, and Iowa.

Emigration from the Mount Lebanon region spiked during the 1910s in the wake of the carnage of World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Not unlike the other communities from the Mediterranean (notably Italians and Greeks) who arrived in the US during the same period, a good number of these newer immigrants became peddlers and door-to-door salespeople. Because they were not from Northern Europe or may have had darker skin, they were considered foreigners, and a backlash developed against the Italians, Greeks, and “Syrians.” They were called “parasites” and were victims of violence and even lynchings. By the mid-1920s, legislation had been prepared to eliminate their visa allotments. One sponsor of the act, a Republican senator from Pennsylvania, famously referred to Arab immigrants as “trash.” As a result, for more than three decades, there was a steep reduction in the number of immigrants from the Arab world who were allowed into the US.

From the late 19th century to 1920, there were at least 100,000 Syrian immigrants. From the date when the anti-Syrian visa restrictions were put in place through 1960, the number of new immigrants from Arab countries declined sharply. During this period, a number of factors, including the absence of new immigrants and the pressures created by two world wars, the Great Depression, and the hyper-patriotism generated by those wars and........

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