Why Michigan?
So why has Michigan—and southeast Michigan in particular-- continued to draw so many immigrants from the Arab world, creating one of the largest Arab communities outside the Middle East?
Fortunately, the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn holds many of the answers.
Its “Coming to America” exhibit tackles the broad history of Arab immigration over many generations—told largely through personal and family stories, along with artifacts like old passports and some small reminders of home migrants carried with them.
That’s because Arab Americans are a diverse group, hailing from the 22 countries that make up the Arab world. And they don’t share a common backstory.
“Some Arab Americans, like my family, came here in the 1890s from Lebanon,” says Matthew Jaber Stiffler, the museum’s researcher. “Some families came here from Iraq or Yemen or Palestine maybe a week ago.”
A map of the United States shows where Arab immigrants have clustered over the years. The largest cluster, by far, is in southeast Michigan.
How big is that population, exactly? Stiffler says that’s a really tough question to answer accurately, for a number of reasons.
That’s largely because Arabs have never been counted as a single racial group for demographic purposes. In old immigration records, they’re noted variously as white, Asian, Syriac, and Turkic, among other terms. Now, the U.S. Census counts them as white.
Stiffler says the formal data has long undercounted the Arab-American population by as much as half.
“For instance, if you look at the census data from 2010, it’s going to say that in the state of Michigan there are a few hundred thousand Arab-Americans,” Stiffler says. “We know that that’s wrong. We know that there’s a few hundred thousand just living here in metropolitan Detroit.”
Stiffler says Arabs started coming to Michigan in the late 19th century. The first wave was made up of mostly Lebanese and Syrian Christians, who worked largely as grocers and peddlers throughout the Midwest.
But Arab immigration really took off at the start of the 20th century, as Detroit’s exploding auto industry drew immigrants from all over the world.
Detroit did draw more Arab immigrants than other big industrial cities of that era. It’s not entirely clear why, but we do have some ideas.