Census: U.S. Arabs well paid, educated
BY GENARO C. ARMAS
ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 9, 2005
WASHINGTON -- The 1.2 million people of Arab descent living in the United States tend to be better educated and wealthier than other Americans, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday.
The population of U.S. residents whose ancestry is solely or partly Arab is less than a half-percent of all Americans. The details in Tuesday's report covered the people who identified themselves in the 2000 census as having only Arab ancestry.
Arabs are nearly twice as likely as the typical U.S. resident to have graduated from college -- 41 percent to 24 percent. The median income for an Arab family was $52,300, about $2,300 more than the median income for all U.S. families.
And the proportion of U.S. Arabs working in management jobs was higher than the U.S. average, 42 percent to 34 percent.
Since the data stops at 2000, it could not measure the impact of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Helen Samhan, executive director of the Arab American Institute Foundation, lauded the bureau for a report that shows "how integrated Arabs are in American life."
"That is something that many Americans don't pay attention to when, usually, the Arab community is only covered in a negative sense," she said.
The findings cover those who responded to the 2000 census long-form questionnaire as having an ancestry from a predominantly Arabic-speaking country or area of the world.
Arab-American groups say the 1.2 million tallied in the census is probably an undercount since many people of Arab ancestry came from countries with oppressive governments and may be reluctant to fill out government forms.
Lebanon was the country of origin for most U.S. Arabs (440,000), followed by Egypt and Syria (about 143,000 each).
The population numbers, first released in 2003, showed the states with the largest Arab populations were California (191,000), New York (120,000) and Michigan (115,000).
Despite the higher median family income, U.S. Arabs had a higher poverty rate (16.7 percent) than the national figure (12.4 percent). Samhan said that's probably a reflection of a lack of wealth possessed by resettled refugees.
The data on U.S. Arabs is the first released since Samhan's group and others criticized the bureau last year for sharing Arab population data with a Homeland Security agency.
The information already was available online, and the data shared did not include names, addresses and other details. But critics said it created a perception among Arab Americans that private information was being passed to law enforcement agencies.
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