How many arabs in dearborn michigan

The kind of sectarianism that has gripped the Middle East, and some other Arab communities globally, has never really taken hold in Metro Detroit.

Rather, clearer divisions in the Arab American community tend to fall more along class lines and degrees of cultural assimilation. Some are relatively wealthy and professional; others are predominantly poor and working-class.

But since the mid th century, conflict in the Middle East has been the main immigration driver. English mixed fluidly with Arabic and Chaldean as the largely-Iraqi crowd enjoyed the festivities.

The event was put on by a number of non-profit and religious groups who serve new arrivals from the Middle East. Metro Detroit has a well-established network of such groups, most of them based in Dearborn. Alloos came to Michigan from Iraq himself in He got a special immigrant visa after serving the US military for several years as a translator and cultural interpreter. According to Alloos, learning English is the key to a successful transition. But migrants also need tutoring in how to navigate the basics of American life—things like establishing credit, opening a bank account, and trying to find a job.

Alloos also tries to help refugees get any government benefits they qualify for. Health care is a particularly important one. Alloos says that with the right kind of assistance and motivation, most refugees make successful transitions to the US.

But even those most eager to embrace American life still yearn for some comforts of the old country. So as the Iraqi community in Sterling Heights, Warren, and other Macomb County suburbs grows, Alloos says it becomes an even more attractive destination for other refugees—even those who initially settled in other, arguably more prosperous parts of the US.

This is why you have people coming here. So in some ways, the story of Arab-American emigration is a unique one.

And so the chain migration phenomenon repeats itself, with whole families and even small towns relocating from the Middle East to Michigan. The US opened up 25, special visas to people from the Middle East in Like most people from that part of the world, Alloos is pessimistic about the near-term future of the Middle East. So while the number of immigrants is limited by federal policies, the grim situation in places like Iraq and Syria means people will keep leaving—and many of them will come to Michigan.

Of course, there are always some challenges when any community assimilates a large group of newcomers. A number of Arab-owned small businesses have popped up. Another display described the intertwined origins of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faiths, all of which took root in the same small corner of the world we are all cousins on the same family tree.

Pointing to 22 nations spread across Africa and Asia, Youssef described their uniting characteristics: all have Arabic as their main language, all are members of the Arab League of Nations, and all have common cultural traditions and a shared history. Thus Iraq is an Arab nation, but Persian-speaking Iran is not. Upstairs, other exhibits focused on the Arab American immigrant experience.

The first recorded Arabic speaker to reach the shores of America was Zammouri, a slave who became a famous healer and explorer more than five centuries ago. The first large wave of Arab immigrants came to the U. In the s, large numbers of Palestinians came to the U. The museum does a beautiful job of telling some of the stories of these immigrants. One of the most poignant displays shows items that they brought with them, from a pillbox full of soil to a VHS videotape of a wedding.

When you have to leave nearly everything behind, whatever is kept becomes incredibly precious. The diversity of stories surprised me. Census for people of Arab descent. An exhibit on media depictions of Arabs was particularly eye-opening. In a survey of 1, films featuring a reference to Arabs, 12 had positive representations, 56 were neutral, and the rest were negative. In many ways the two are linked, but the history of the Arab American community extends prior to the history of Ford Motor Company: Arabs began to come to southeast Michigan well before the consolidation of the auto industry.

Arabs first arrived in the United States in the s. The Lebanese diaspora in West Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Australia tended to focus on commerce, enlisting extended families as the labor necessary for shops and trading concerns. In the U. Those who succeeded tended to move into metropolitan areas like Detroit and Chicago and sponsor the immigration of others from their families or villages back in Lebanon.

As more and more Lebanese were able to earn enough money to establish general stores, they began to send for their families. This is a familiar immigrant narrative in the U. Just as the auto industry transformed the economic landscape of Michigan, it restructured the burgeoning Arab-American community. Since Ford's racist hiring policies generally excluded African-Americans from employment in the auto plants, the marked growth in the industry meant plentiful jobs for new immigrants.

Though they received work with Ford and others they still suffered the effects of discrimination in the daily operations of the plants: even today, a disproportionately high percentage of dangerous jobs go to Arab immigrants who do not have the kind of support from the union or informal factory networks that would allow them to demand better positions on the production line.

The development of the auto industry throughout the 20th century also largely explains the spatial makeup of the Dearborn area. The Arab American community gradually concentrated in the Dearborn row houses constructed by Henry Ford, literally in the shadows of the Rouge plant. But it was not only the Arab American community that found relative economic security in the high salaries paid by Henry Ford: up until the s over fifty languages were spoken in the working-class neighborhoods of south and east Dearborn.

Dearborn's South End still looks like a company town, with many of the same houses standing in carefully laid-out grids. But the neighborhood is much smaller, and the air of prosperity has given way to the visible strains of the social and economic problems of Metro Detroit. Now Dearborn's communities are spatially contained, divided between those whose foothold in the middle class enabled them to weather the downturn in the Michigan economy of the late s and s and those who struggle to navigate the complexities of a segmented labor market and a shrinking social-services bureaucracy.

The Arab American community, along with other minorities, has been affected by these changes. Nonetheless, Dearborn has assumed a cultural importance independent of the auto industry. With increasing waves of Lebanese arriving with the onset of World War I and the demise of the Ottoman Empire, Dearborn emerged as a center for Lebanese and Arab migration.

Family histories and genealogies placed Dearborn alongside Jerusalem or Beirut, as the Arabs that followed the initial influx of merchant Lebanese faced the harsh realities of diaspora. Most of the post-World War II immigrants from the Middle East fled war and severe economic deprivation; this was the case of Palestinians arriving after the creation of Israel in , and a new surge of Lebanese in the wake of the s civil war and the Israeli invasion.

The social life of Arab Dearborn shifts with both the vagaries of the southeast Michigan labor market and the political and economic landscape of natal towns in the Middle East. Rifts within the heterogeneous Arab American community also shape life in Dearborn, though these divisions are not those of Middle East antagonisms rewritten in concentrated form on the geography of Dearborn.

At first glance, the buildings have nothing in common, but a closer investigation reveals that they not only share a common purpose, but stand as testament to the changing economic and demographic fortunes of a Motor City that was once the engine of US manufacturing, but has since become a bye-word for post-industrial decline. The exhibition, which features the work of about 40 Saudi-based artists, joins the AANM's existing show, Safar: a Journey Through Popular Arab Cinema , an exhibition of vintage film memorabilia from the private collection of the Beirut-based collector Abboudi Bou Jaoudeh.

If the home of American industrialism sounds like an unlikely location for such shows, it shouldn't, says Devon Akmon, the director of the AANM. Dearborn now boasts the largest and most diverse Arab community in the US, and of the city's 98, residents, more than 30 per cent identify as Arab-American or claim some form of Arab descent. The other strand of the museum's activities, which address Arab communities, adopt a grassroots, community-based approach that focus on culture.