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Arab Americans: Past and Present

© Aida Hasan

ARAB AMERICANS

The first time I learned that my grandfather had come to America as early as 1912, I was amazed. Growing up watching old American movies, I somehow never imagined that my family had a presence here even before the time of these seemingly "ancient" images on the television. As a child, I don't know when I imagined my family first immigrated to America. I was well aware that neither of my parents were born in the U.S. , so I certainly did not imagine that my ancestors could have been here at a time when people still traveled by horse drawn carriages. Yet, as a very young man, my grandfather had traveled for almost a month by ship, and set foot on American land a little over a decade after the turn of the century. He came at a time when street lights lining the avenues were still manually lit each evening. Although his stay here was not permanent, his very early immigration to the United States seemed somewhat odd to me. I wondered then the same thing that I wonder now: If Arabs were present in America so long ago, why is there so little said and known about this cultural group? While I cannot attempt to answer such a complex question here in this article, I provide some basic facts about Arab Americans and their early immigration to the U.S.

Early Arab Immigration to America

My grandfathers early arrival in America in 1912, although surprising to me, was not unusual among Arab families of the time. Even the great ship Titanic which set sail that same year had approximately one hundred Arab passengers aboard, bound for America. However, groups of Arabs had arrived in America much earlier than that. The first noted large immigration of Arabs to the U.S. began as early as 1860. Some writers on Arab immigration to the U.S. divide the flow of immigration roughly into two waves. The first major group was from 1860 to 1920. The second major group started in 1940, the early post World War II wave of immigrants. Arabs immigrating during the first wave consisted primarily of individuals from Lebanon and Syria mostly, with some coming from Egypt. The majority of immigrants at this time were Christian Arabs. Thus, many Christian Arab Americans today are third or more generation Americans. On the other hand, the second wave of Arab immigrants to the U.S., that beginning after 1940, were predominantly Muslim and hailing from a variety of Arab countries.

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