[MUSIC - Marden Hill: Hijack]

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, we will do our latest April segments for this National Poetry Month and Arab American Heritage Month. Poetry coming up in a bit. Listeners heads up, it will be Poetry Month open mic. We're inviting you to call in and recite a few lines, let's say about 30 seconds of any poem that's meaningful to you. Get your short poetry readings ready. We'll do that later this hour.

It's Arab American Heritage Month, part three on this show. Up first, last week, as some of you heard, we invited listeners of Arab descent to call in and share your immigration stories here in year four after President Biden declared April Arab-American Heritage Month in the United States in 2021.

We had so many great stories we didn't have time to hear. We're coming back to it again today for part two. Listeners, call in with your Arab-American family's immigration story to America, 212-433-WNYC. Of course, this could be yourself, but it could be your parents' story. It could be your grandparents' story or earlier ancestors from anywhere in the Arab world. Tell us your family immigration story to America at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Our phones are open for you.

We're going to add one more part to our question to you for today, which is, are the events in the Middle East particularly difficult for you right now in the context of being Arab American? We try to hear all voices here. We listened with our guest, Noah Feldman, this week, on how difficult a time it is for many American Jews on this Passover Week.

Now, Arab Americans in this Arab American Heritage Month segment. Maybe you have Palestinian roots. Has the war brought you closer to those roots in some way, or people from any other Arab background? How about people of Middle Eastern descent who are Christian, because Arabs are not all Muslims?

There are also some Arab Jews, even though we don't usually think about Jews in that category. Yes, Yemeni Jews, Syrian Jews, or at least of descent from those countries. Maybe you are a child of an interfaith marriage. What sorts of thoughts are you having right now, if at least part of your family is Arab American? Are you coming to new thoughts about identity as time goes on in this country? 212-433-WNYC, our phones are open at 212-433-9692 particularly for your Arab American family's immigration story, you can talk about your feelings as an Arab American in the context of the Gaza War.

Joining us for this round two of your calls and to take us through some of the history of immigration, once again is Maya Berry, Executive Director of the Arab American Institute, a non-profit, nonpartisan national civil rights advocacy organization. Maya, thanks so much for joining us for this again.

Maya Berry: Thank you, Brian. Thank you so much for the way that you've been covering this month. It's incredibly meaningful.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. The last time you were on, we had a caller share how her family landed in the United States, and then moved around a bunch. Did most Arab immigrants land in New York City during those early waves of immigration that we focused on in part one, the 1800s to the early 1900s? If they ended up in other cities or states, where did they go? How much kind of movement? How did they wind up in Michigan? Everybody's talking about the Arab population in Michigan these days. There's no port in Michigan as far as I know.

Maya Berry: No. There's no port.

Brian Lehrer: Except on a lake.

Maya Berry: Yes. Wonderful lakes. Many wonderful lakes. You're talking to a Michigander, so that'll come through. Like the many immigrants that had come to the United States during that period, a lot of them came through New York City. It's the reason that during our last conversation, we talked about what we called the original colony in little Syria, that Lower Manhattan in New York City.

Given how frankly scrappy immigrants have to be, they arrive and they have to find a way to make a living. You will find that many will follow, for economic reasons, different areas where they can settle. The earlier Arab immigrants, we had a lot who were peddlers. Think about a person that would show up with a cart to provide a particular product. They were in many of those major urban industrial cities that we would think of.

We had New York, we had Boston, we had Pittsburgh, and certainly Detroit metropolitan area was part of it. My story's a little different. I'm actually an immigrant to this country. I'm a product of the third wave of immigrants. My family and I came here during the Lebanese Civil War. Specifically, came to the US with the idea being that we would be here for a short period of time and then go back after the war ended. The Lebanese War lasted 15 years, so we didn't go back.

We settled in Dearborn, Michigan. I'm actually also from Dearborn, though we had no connection to the auto industry, but my aunts and uncles who were there previous to us were there. It was a follow- a family immigration pattern and ended up settling there. The Dearborn story is a fascinating one. I'd love to spend more time on it because it's-- I'm very protective of a community I care deeply about.

I also think it's so deeply misunderstood. When I see Dearborn, Michigan trending on social media, my heart sinks a bit because I know it's never a story about this incredible place but rather a lot of discrimination and often bigotry.

Brian Lehrer: Give us an example of what's missing.

Maya Berry: The first is, Dearborn, Michigan, Henry Ford's history there specifically was in the Guinness Book of World Record at one point for having the most languages spoken, the idea being immigrants were showing up for that famous $ 5-a-week job. It was a way to be able to earn a living. Our community came to Dearborn for those very reasons early on, like I said, like all other immigrants, and settled there during that initial wave primarily at the time as Christian immigrants.

The earlier immigrants were predominantly from the Mount Lebanon region of the Middle East of the Arab world. They were manly Christians. We began to see a change. A lot of the Muslim immigrants began to arrive in the Detroit area after the 1970s folks like myself. You have an incredibly rich, diverse community that's there.

When you talk about how did they end up there during, for example, the Iraq War, where we began to see additional Iraqi refugees arrive here in the United States. They would arrive and we would, via programs, provide settlement dollars, and they would be sent to different parts of the country. They would find their way to Dearborn because they knew there was a high concentration of Arab Americans there, and people wanted to be part of that area.

It's an incredibly interesting story where we now have our first Arab American elected mayor of that city in 2021. It's a city that has a challenging history in terms of its racism, frankly. Surrounded in part by Detroit, Michigan, and had a history of a very anti-Black mayor at the time during the 1968 riots. Famous for having stood at the border with a weapon suggesting that Black citizens are not to come into the city. For years, Dearborn had something called Keep Dearborn Clean as a campaign for presumably litter, but it was definitely understood that it was rooted in a very real anti-Black racist history.

I was talking about this interesting dynamic where you had a history with a lot of just blatant anti-Black racism, but yet it was the immigrants who came across the Atlantic and settled there. It's part of the American story. You can't prevent progress.

Brian Lehrer: There you go. Like Maya, any other Lebanese Americans listening right now? It's not a population that gets a lot of press with other Middle Eastern countries. More in the news in recent years, she was mentioning Iraq. We know about the Syrian refugees. A guy who hired me here was Lebanese American, old program director back in the day. There are Lebanese Americans in our midst. Anyone out there right now wants to tell your Lebanese family crossing story to the United States. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433--9692.

Let's tick through some more history, mostly chronologically. Arab American immigration through the decades has been fraught because of how the United States has tried to categorize people of Arab descent. I know that's going to change in the next census. We did a segment on that this month.

Discriminatory laws such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act limited immigration and prevented Asians from becoming US citizens. At that time, Maya, there was a question, wasn't there as to whether Arab immigrants were Asian, right?

Maya Berry: Yes. It's a fascinating history in terms of understanding this. Actually, it comes up directly to the segment that you covered previously with regards to the new Middle East and North Africa, MENA category, because people, when we were advocating for decades to try to get a new category on the census, sometimes folks would say, "We've not encountered a community that doesn't want to be white anymore."

I would have to explain that this effort wasn't necessarily about not being categorized as racially white. It was about not being characterized as racially white exclusively. The thing to understand is that Arab Americans are a diverse community. They can be white. They can be Black. They can identify in different ways.

When we talk about this period, the story I love to share is of a police officer named George Shishmi in Venice, California, who had arrested the son of a prominent attorney for disturbing the peace. One of the defenses that was posed against George at the time, this was in 1909, was that, "You can't arrest my son because you are not a citizen, and you're not eligible for your citizenship." That court case, George [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Wasn't he of Lebanese descent, too? Do I have that history right?

Maya Berry: Absolutely. Lebanon hadn't even been declared an independent state. We're still talking about Mount Lebanon, so it's the greater Syria. He was indeed--

Brian Lehrer: Ottoman Empire.

Maya Berry: That's correct. He was indeed Lebanese, and he went to court. Because of the Asian Exclusionary Act, because of the fact that at the time, citizenship was directly tied to European ancestry, you could not become a citizen unless you were-- He fought in court and used the line that if George was also a Christian, and he said, "If Jesus were white, then I, too, am white." That is a historic case that takes us back to this narrative about the identity of Arab Americans in this country. The reality was it was a very pragmatic and practical approach that George and Arab Americans then were taking to be able to receive citizenship and become naturalized.

Brian Lehrer: I have that quote from federal court because you tipped us off to it. George Shishim said, "If I am a Mongolian," meaning Asian, "If I am a Mongolian, then so is Jesus because we came from the same land." Wow. Ernie in Westchester You're on WNYC. Hello, Ernie.

Ernie: Hi, Brian. Thanks. It's a pleasure to talk to you. My grandparents immigrated from what was then, as your guests were saying, Syria, that is now Lebanon, and somehow found themselves moving to Nebraska.

The interesting thing about their story is that somehow, my grandfather made a trade with some guy, and he acquired 60 acres of land to homestead in a little town south of Millboro, South Dakota, right on the Nebraska border. They moved in 1910. They traveled in a wagon several hundred miles from O'Neill, Nebraska, to south of Millboro, which is literally, and still is, in the middle of nowhere, and homesteaded for 10 years from 1910 to 1920 in South Dakota. I thought it was a fascinating story.

Maya Berry: I just love hearing--

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead, Maya. You go.

Maya Berry: No, I was saying I just love hearing that. I didn't mention it, but homesteading was absolutely part of our history in this country, with South Dakota, North Dakota, Oklahoma. There were community folks who exactly as the caller's grandfather did.

Brian Lehrer: What an example of what you were saying before about people moving around and not just settling in New York or on the Coast. Another bit of history that we're actually going to do a deep dive on later in the year. The Johnson-Reed Act quota system, 100 years ago this year, starting in 1924, it drastically reduced the number of Arab immigrants to the United States for four decades.

About a thousand people from Arab countries, only a thousand, were allowed into the US per year, according to the Arab American National Museum. Of course, that 1924 very restrictive immigration act was a backlash to Ellis Island, generally, and restricted immigration for all kinds of people until it loosened up in the '60s. We're going to do a 100-year lens on the Johnson-Reed Act later in the year. Can you talk a little bit about that period of time in the context of Arab-American immigration in particular?

Maya Berry: I think it's incredibly important that you're going to cover it because it really was, in some ways, indicative of the change in our country that I think we are struggling with now. It was indeed the first time that we put in numerical limits on immigration. We began a national immigration quota system at the time. Like other immigrants who didn't come from Europe, Arab Americans were deeply impacted by it. You saw the Arab American National Museum number is absolutely correct.

You saw a major restriction of the number of folks that had come in. During that first wave that we talked about before the act, so the 1880 to 1924 period, you had roughly about almost 100,000 Arab immigrants come to the United States during that period, among the 20 million immigrants that had come during that period as well. Then you get this act, and you have a complete restriction that gets put in place.

The only folks that were able to come in during that period were educated and elite folks from different countries. We were looking for doctors or engineers. You saw some numbers from Iraq and Egypt and Palestine, again, the greater Syria area, but it changed the way that folks were coming into the US and changed their country during that period.

Brian Lehrer: A little more oral history now from Leila May in Manhattan. You're on WNYC. Hello, Leila May.

Leila May: Hello.

Brian Lehrer: Hello.

Leila May: My name is Leila May, as you know. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I can hear you, Leila.

Leila May: Hello.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Can you hear me?

Leila May: Yes. I am from Lebanon, but I came here via Europe originally because I was studying there when the Lebanese War broke out, the Civil War. After living several years in England and in France, I realized I could never become a French person or a British person in the same way you can become an American. My boyfriend at the time had an American nationality. We came here on a fiance visa, and I'm very glad I made the move. New York is my choice because I started in Chicago, but I felt too much like an alien there. New York is home to everyone.

Brian Lehrer: Leila May, thank you very much. Beautiful piece of oral history. Let's go right on to somebody else. Maria in Fairfield County in Connecticut. You're on WNYC. Hi, Maria.

Maria: Thank you for taking my call. I came as an undergraduate, 17-year-old alone, not as an immigrant, and ended up falling in love with an American and stayed here. This was in 1966. What I want to say is that there are a lot of Syrians who come out of the medical school in Syria because it's much better to be a doctor here than there. Obviously, highly educated.

If you look in Cleveland, if you look all over the place, and you have states and memorials from Keteri, a lot of Syrian doctors. It's a bit of an income issue. You have obviously the refugees, but you also have a very large portion of well-educated people from Syria and Lebanon that come here because, politically, life there is not very good.

Brian Lehrer: It's part of the pattern of immigration, certainly since the year that you cited that you came when a lot changed. 1966, you said, Maria, right?

Maria: Yes, but I came as an undergraduate student, so I didn't come as a refugee or anything. I came on a student visa and ended up staying. I know a lot of people that came in the '80s when things were really bad in Syria. They're doctors. All those guys I know are doctors if you look all over the country.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

Maria: It's a very mixed picture of-

Brian Lehrer: Absolutely

Maria: -the atheists and Christians.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, indeed. Thank you for that story and for raising that pattern, Maya. It's a common pattern from a number of countries. India comes to mind as one where you get the elite in the first wave who qualify in certain easier ways to qualify for immigration to the United States. Then under the 1965 immigration law, they can bring in the their siblings. It got nicknamed, I'm sure you know this, the Brothers and Sisters Act.

The battle continues to this day with people trying to restrict that kind of what they call chain migration through the relatives, but the people who get the toehold for the families are often people who are admitted more easily because they have those professional skills, doctors as Maria says, or others. I wonder how true you'd say that pattern holds for waves of immigration from the Arab world since the law changed to liberalize immigration in the '60s.

Maya Berry: Yes, and deep Brian, that's exactly right. In our case, that first wave that came were actually not necessarily skilled. These are folks who came here initially. It's the second wave that you're talking about that we just mentioned, where you had to be highly skilled in order to get beyond the strict immigration laws that were put in place.

Maria talks about Syrian doctors leaving Syria. You really did see a significant brain drain in those countries of origin as a product of that. Then we get to this third wave, which is, as you said, after the INA passed, many important developments after the INA is 1965 passage, but one of the most important things is what you just said, really, the family visa system was put in place, so it's the family reunification. It's, again, technically how we got to come here [laughs]. Both my mother and father had siblings that were here in the US, and it's part of the way that we were able to come.

The other point I want to mention about Maria is when she came in 1966, after the 1967 war in Palestine, Israel, you really did see a significant influx of students from Palestine, students from Egypt, and students from those areas who came here to the United States. Like her, many of them stayed and have been an incredibly important contributions to our country. During that period, we think about it in terms of more than 400,000 immigrants who came here then.

It's a community that was a little different in that they also were more Muslim than Christian during that period. One of the things I think is important from callers to understand, the majority of Arab Americans in this country are actually Christian. A plurality used to be a majority, but now a plurality of the American Muslim in this country are Black. The single largest growing segment of the American Muslim population is actually Latino.

Folks often conflate Arabs and Muslims, the ethnicity with the faith. Obviously, that shouldn't happen, but it definitely shouldn't happen with regards to the Arab American community because while the majority of Arabs in the region are Muslim, the majority here, we're talking about American communities are not. It's one of those things that I think is just helpful for folks to understand.

It's also interesting to go back to our conversation about Dearborn. Dearborn is definitely majority Arab American and definitely majority Arab American Muslim, but that is not reflective of the broader demographics of Arab Americans in the country. I love talking about Dearborn, but what I try carefully not to do is to suggest that it represents the broader community nationally entirely.

Brian Lehrer: Very illuminating for a lot of our listeners, I'm sure. All right, one more oral history call. Michelle in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Michelle, we only have about a minute for you, but I'm glad I got to squeeze you in. Hello.

Michelle: Hi. How are you? Thanks so much for taking my call. Yes, my great-grandparents immigrated from Lebanon to Chicago, and then my grandfather, [unintelligible 00:23:43], moved to Minneapolis where there was, I'm told, the first Lebanese mayor. That's why he ended up immigrating to Minneapolis and my [unintelligible 00:23:49] was with him, and that's where we all grew up. He ended up becoming Hubert Humphrey's closest advisor and held the Bible for Hubert Humphrey while he was sworn in as vice president of the United States. To the guest's point, we are Christian Lebanese.

Brian Lehrer: Hubert Humphrey, who was Lyndon Johnson's vice president, and then the Democratic nominee for president in 1968, though he lost to Richard Nixon. Do you have any story from his time advising the vice president?

Michelle: I just know he wasn't an educated guy. He was a street guy. It was a consigliere. I'm told that Hubert really trusted him. I have pictures of Hubert Humphrey holding my siblings and me hanging on my mom's leg when I was a little kid. Yes, I've got a picture of my mom dancing with JFK. I know my [unintelligible 00:24:53], she stopped going to school at nine years old. To go from that to dancing with JFK and hanging with Hubert Humphrey is cool.

Brian Lehrer: That's a great story. What an American story, Maya, right? American immigration story.

Maya Berry: I could just join you to listen to these callers, these incredible stories, and it is the truth. This is the story of Arab Americans. That is exactly the kind of history that's there and one that's not often understood, which is why I'm so grateful that Arab American Heritage Month exists. It is addressing, frankly, our exclusion and our erasure, and these stories, these wonderful narratives explain why it's so important to do.

Brian Lehrer: There's a lot more we could do, but we're out of time for this segment and so we leave it there for today with Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan national civil rights advocacy organization. Thanks so much for coming on again and hearing these stories with us from our wonderful callers, and thank you for being such a great guest.

Maya Berry: Thank you, Brian.

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