I haven’t been paying any attention to the Census other than noting that we have received at least three mailings telling us to get it done.
Here we learn that Arab-speaking immigrants to the Detroit area are working hard to be sure they are not undercounted so they can get their government goodies. But, government goodies aren’t given out to specific ethnic groups anyway.
I suspect the real reason is that they want to be sure that mostly Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa are designated separately as a way to show their potential political power.
Hard-to-count Arab Americans urged to prioritize census
A Detroit area billboard
DEARBORN, Mich. — (AP) — At a Michigan gas station, the message is obvious — at least to Arabic speakers: Be counted in the 2020 census.
“Provide your community with more/additional opportunities,” the ad on the pump handle reads in Arabic. In the fine print, next to “United States Census 2020,” it adds: “To shape your future with your own hands, start here.”
As state officials and nonprofit groups target hard-to-count groups like immigrants, people of color and those in poverty, many Arab Americans say the undercount is even more pronounced for them.
That means one of the largest and most concentrated Arab populations outside the Middle East — those in the Detroit area — could be missing out on federal funding for education, health care, crime prevention and other programs that the census determines how to divvy up.
That also includes money to help states address the fallout from the coronavirus.
“We are trying to encourage people not just to fill it out because of all the reasons we had given before, where there’s education and health care and all of that, but also because it is essential for the federal government to know who is in Michigan at this point more than ever before,” said Rima Meroueh, director of policy and advocacy with Dearborn-based ACCESS, one of the largest Arab American advocacy nonprofits in the country.
The Arab American community checks many boxes that census and nonprofit officials say are hallmarks of the hardest-to-count communities: large numbers of young children, non-English speakers, recent immigrants and those who often live in multifamily or rental housing.
But groups face a hurdle after the Trump administration decided not to include a category that counts people from the Middle East or North Africa as their own group. The Census Bureau recommended the so-called MENA box in 2017 after years of research and decades of advocacy.
The decision to scrap the choice angers many Arab Americans, who say it hinders representation and needed funding. Democratic U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, an Arab American representing part of Detroit and several suburbs, expressed her displeasure while questioning Census Bureau director Steven Dillingham on Capitol Hill in February.
“The community did it right — they went through the process,” she said. “You’re making us invisible.”
Does it make any sense to you? Is the area around Detroit going to get any less stuff if Arab-speaking people of the Middle East and North Africa don’t get a separate category? Or is it more about flexing some Arab-power muscle?
Just so you know here (below) is the region they are talking about, the region they call MENA—the area (still expanding) colonized by the followers of Mohammed.
Do we refer to Muslims in Africa as colonizers or is that dirty word only reserved for western countries that colonized Africa through the centuries? Just wondering. Heck we could say that Arabs are colonizing Michigan and Somalis are colonizing Minnesota!
A little fact you might not know: The number one language of refugeesadmitted to the US for at least the last twelve years is Arabic.
“Without a racial classification for Arab-Americans by the U.S. Census Bureau, the population’s mental health goes largely unstudied – particularly in a political climate that threatens it.”
(Science writer Passant Rabie)
Here is an article you likely didn’t see from a publication called ScienceLine. Writer Passant Rabie is an Egyptian living in New York who is concerned about environmental justice as well as race and genetics.
In her article she argues that there should be a box for Arabs on questionnaires and on the census to identify the exact number of Arabs living in America.
She explains that their mental health suffers (even more than she says it already does!) when they must check the “white” box.
Arab-Americans’ mental health suffers due to census box
Within my first week of moving from Egypt to the U.S., I was forced to undergo a series of medical exams and receive a host of vaccinations. But it wasn’t the needles piercing into my left arm that made it an unpleasant welcome to a new country. It was the medical forms.
Before filling out my information at the student health center, I was asked to check an ethnicity box. I hovered my pencil over the given options: white, black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander. Not sure if this is the final version of the 2020 Census form.
I struggled to find where I fit in. And then, right there next to the ‘white’ category, it read in parenthesis, “A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.” This was awkward. I was about to get a tuberculosis shot in order to stay in a place where I already felt like I didn’t belong. Rather than having our own racial category, U.S. residents originating from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are made to check off “white” on their health forms. Even for someone like me, just arrived and whose jet-lag still hadn’t worn off, checking off that ethnic box was alienating. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like for those who had grown up here, and all the times they were made to check off a box that wasn’t theirs.
Beyond cloaking millions of people in invisibility, the lack of a MENA ethnic box has also proven problematic when trying to conduct research on the minority group’s mental health. Approximately 3.7 million Americans claim Arab ancestry, according to estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau. But there is no way to obtain nationwide data on Arab-Americans’ health because they are not identified as an ethnic group. This leads to major health disparities and an inability to provide for the group’s medical and psychological needs.
She tells us that Arabs in America have a lot of mental health problems:
Meanwhile, no MENA box means crucial nation-wide data on the mental health of Arab-Americans’ continues to go unrecorded at a time when anti-Muslim rhetoric and its accompanying mental health stress is on the rise. People of Middle Eastern descent are more prone to psychological distress, as revealed by a 2013 study that was the first to estimate the prevalence of psychological disorders among the MENA population in the U.S. The study compared the mental health disparities between people grouped as ‘non-Hispanic whites,’ revealing that ‘whites’ from the Middle East were twice as likely to report serious psychological distress when compared to whites of European descent. Additionally, Middle-Easterners suffering from psychological distress were less likely to have seen a mental health professional within the last 12 months, according to the study.
Read the whole thing. She says that mental health problems already existed in the Arab community, but we made the problem worse for them after 9/11. Hmmmm?
See that she also blames Trump (who doesn’t!) because she says his administration nixed the idea of a special category for Arabs on the 2020 Census form. What do you think? I do think we need a special category for Arabs so that we can have a count of how many are living in the US.
