Two Arab-American Groups Merge for “Political Empowerment” in 21st Century

By Richard H. Curtiss

On Jan. 1, 2000 a merger between the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and the National Association of Arab Americans (NAAA) took effect. Observers at the Dec. 29 conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC at which the amalgamation was announced found it an appropriate way to begin the second century of Arab presence in North America.

They were less certain, however, whether combining the two organizations marks “a significant milestone in the political empowerment of Arab Americans,” as announced by leaders of the two organizations, or a resigned acceptance that there no longer is enough interest among the immigrants from the 21 Arab countries and their offspring to support both of these major national organizations.

The Arab pioneers in North America were the 50,000 to 100,000 immigrants to the United States from the Levantine lands comprising present-day Syria, Lebanon and Palestine who arrived between 1890 and 1920, after which U.S. immigration laws were changed for a generation to favor immigrants from Europe. It was only with the liberalization of these laws after World War II that large-scale Arab immigration into the U.S. resumed. But by then the migrants came from virtually every major Arab country.

The immigrants also represented a wide economic and social range. The turn-of-the century arrivals from the Levant had brought with them few trades or skills but were hard-working individualists.

By contrast, many of the post-World War II arrivals first came as graduate students to North American universities with no intention of remaining after they received their degrees. But many stayed on and others were stranded by political changes in the Middle East, such as the fighting in Palestine that resulted in the expulsion of 750,000 Muslim and Christian Palestinians who had been living within the borders of present-day Israel.

Other groups represented in the post-World War II wave of Middle Eastern immigrants varied widely. They included Muslim immigrants from the mountain villages of Yemen, who gravitated to the auto factories of Michigan, and who today form a large colony in Dearborn, Michigan, home of the Ford Motor company. Another major community, centered in Detroit, are the Christian Chaldeans from northern Iraq, who consider themselves political as well as economic refugees. Members of another distinct group are the Christian Assyrians of eastern Turkey and northern Iraq, of whom the largest concentration in the world is in Chicago.

Not all immigrants from Iraq represent minority groups, however. With the initial development of that country’s abundant petroleum resources, large numbers of Iraqi students traveled to study at American universities. Most returned to Iraq, but after successive political upheavals and the resulting economic hardships, a majority of Iraq’s American-educated technocrats returned to live in the United States.

Egypt presents another case study of the different forces propelling a large-scale immigration from the Middle East’s most populous Arab country. With universal, free education through the university level available to all who are academically qualified, Egypt produces a huge annual surplus of university graduates. Those who find positions in the rapidly developing economies of the oil-producing states of the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf have become Egypt’s largest source of foreign exchange. However, many other Egyptians, knowing there are not enough positions at home to absorb their technical skills, travel to the U.S. for graduate degrees and then remain or return there.

Such “educated elites” from Egypt, Iraq and Palestine are part of the “brain drain” which continues to attract to the United States some of the best and brightest from every country in the world. But the stream of Egyptian immigrants is supplemented by an influx of middle-class Coptic Christians who feel that because of their minority status they cannot find job opportunities in Egypt’s relatively static economy commensurate with their skills.

Further, Lebanon’s civil war from 1975 to 1990 brought a new influx of Lebanese of all ages who took advantage of relaxed U.S. visa requirements to, literally, save their lives. And more Syrians who have found their way to North America have stayed because of lack of economic opportunities at home.

Finally, like Britain, Canada, Australia, Germany and countries throughout the Middle East, the United States has taken in a very large number of Palestinian refugees since the creation of Israel in 1948. This immigration got off to a fast start when the U.S. accepted a special quota of 100,000 of the Palestinians who had been denied permission to return to their homes inside Israel’s “Green Line” borders. These, in turn, became the nucleus of a steady subsequent immigration of both Muslim and Christian Palestinians over the following half-century.

Although by now there are Americans who trace their ancestry to every one of the 21 Arab states, the representation is uneven. Many Arabs from the six oil-producing states of the Arabian Gulf Cooperation Council have attended U.S. universities, but virtually none have become permanent residents because economic opportunities for the native-born are more favorable in their own countries.

Nor are there as yet many Arab immigrants in the U.S. from the seven Arab states of North Africa and the Horn of Africa which formerly were under French or Italian domination. Because of linguistic and family ties, many who emigrate from those countries gravitate to France or Italy or to Canada’s French-speaking Quebec Province.

So, slightly more than a century after Arab immigration began, how many Arab Americans are there? I posed that question at the Dec. 29 press conference and received a variety of answers from the participants. In his prepared remarks, NAAA board chairman George Gorayeb suggested a total of three million. ADC press spokesman Hussain Ibish estimated it is four million. Former ADC president Alfred Mokhiber speculated that it might have grown to 4.5 million. One reason for the vagueness is that such information has never been included in a national census.

Better known are the numbers of Arab Americans in some major metropolitan areas of the country, where they have the potential to swing elections in specific congressional districts if they choose to exercise it. In Detroit alone there are 300,000 Arab Americans. It is perhaps no coincidence that Michigan is the only state at present with an Arab-American senator, Republican Spence Abraham.

Equally important, perhaps, is the concentration of half a million Arab Americans in Southern California who, if they should form alliances with the enormous Iranian-American population there, and with the more than 200,000 Muslim Americans in the San Francisco Bay area, could even determine who gets all of the electoral votes of the nation’s most populous state in the 2000 presidential election.

Will such potential political power be realized? Or is the “political empowerment of Arab Americans” so hopefully cited at the Dec. 29 press conference only a mirage? The evidence is mixed.

The oldest of the largely political Arab-American organizations was the NAAA. Founded in the late 1970s, until the recent merger it was the only Arab-American group registered to lobby Congress. Since it emphasized foreign affairs, shortly after its creation the NAAA found itself being torn apart by the tensions generated by the Lebanese civil war. Eventually it settled into a stance of strongly supporting the Palestinian cause, but some Christian Lebanese- American members began devoting more of their energies to purely Lebanese-American organizations.

The next oldest group, the ADC, took protection of civil rights of Arab Americans at home and human rights of Palestinians abroad as its two major causes. It soon had the largest grassroots membership of any Arab-American group and it has active chapters in many major U.S. metropolitan areas. Since its principal founder was former Sen. James Abourezk, a South Dakota Democrat of Lebanese ancestry, for a time the ADC was considered the organization for Arab-American Democrats while the NAAA identified more with Arab-American Republicans. However these distinctions disappeared in the 1990s.

Hard Financial Times

Both groups have fallen on hard financial times in recent years. The ADC has been kept alive through strenuous efforts and personal financial support by two successive board chairmen, Hamzi Moghrabi of Denver and Naila Asali of Chicago, and the organization’s president and chief executive officer, Dr. Hala Maksoud, niece of former Lebanese Prime Minister Saeb Salam, and wife of Dr. Clovis Maksoud, the former representative of the Arab League to the United Nations, who now teaches at the American University in Washington, DC.

Without such a financial cushion, the NAAA, which gradually dwindled from a paid staff of more than 20 to only 3 persons, entered into a year and a half of negotiations which resulted in the integration into the ADC of the NAAA staff. The former NAAA lobbying role will be continued by a joint NAAA-ADC entity, which will combine the concerns of both parent organizations for human rights overseas and civil rights within the United States.

These moves do not put all of the Arab-American organizational eggs into one basket, however. According to former ADC president Mokhiber, there are about 17 groups affiliated with the national Council of Presidents of Arab-American Organizations, including two other national Arab-American political organizations.

The most visible of these is the Arab American Institute (AAI), based in Washington, DC. Its founder-president is James Zogby, a co-founder, with Senator Abourezk, of the ADC. Later Zogby founded the AAI, taking a new organizational approach based roughly on the models of two separate Jewish groups affiliated with the two major U.S. political parties.

AAI president Zogby heads an AAI division which encourages Arab Americans to become active in Democratic Party politics at all levels. AAI board chairman George Salem heads a twin AAI division which encourages Arab-American participation in Republican Party activities. While maintaining his AAI affiliation, Salem served as a paid political appointee in the Republican Reagan and Bush administrations. Similarly, during the first six years of the Clinton administration, Zogby was a paid consultant to a USAID operation charged with attracting American private investment to the Palestinian Authority-administered West Bank and Gaza.

The other national group is Arab American University Graduates (AAUG). It began in the late 1970s as a mutual-support network for Arab Americans teaching or doing research at U.S. universities. Subsequently it became more politicized, retaining its academic orientation and becoming a liberal advocacy group for Palestinian human rights. At present it operates with a paid staff of one from space rented with the ADC in Washington, DC.

Also of obvious relevance to “Arab-American political empowerment” is the rapid growth of Islam in America. There are six to eight million Muslims of great ethnic diversity in the United States, and Islam is the nation’s fastest-growing religion. However, as yet there is not a single Muslim in the U.S. Congress, the Supreme Court, the president’s cabinet, or even in a State Department or Pentagon policymaking position. All this has shocked the previously apolitical “sleeping giant” of Islam in America into increasing political awareness.

While this may have caused many Muslim Arab Americans to shift their personal focus from Arab-American to Muslim-American political organizations, together, the Arab-American and Muslim- American groups can mutually reinforce each other. In the wake of the ADC-NAAA merger, Arab-American activists are upbeat regarding both domestic and foreign policy concerns.

“We all agree on either a democratic secular state in Palestine or the need for a fair-minded land-for-peace agreement between Israel on the one hand and Lebanon, Syria and a Palestinian state on the other,” said one Arab-American political activist. “Arab Americans, regardless of country of origin, also agree that U.S.–backed sanctions are hurting the Iraqi people but helping Saddam Hussain; that the dual containment policy against Iraq and Iran is a failure that hurts American interests; and that all U.S. aid to both Israel and the Arabs should be tied to performance at the peace table.

“On the other hand, American supporters of Israel are deeply divided among themselves,” the Arab American activist continued. “The policies they advocate are increasingly unpopular with U.S. taxpayers, contrary to U.S. national interests, and endanger American citizens abroad and perhaps even at home. At present the pro-Israel groups may have the money, the manpower and even the media on their side. But we have the truth.”

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report.