The Muslim Wave
Dealing with Immigration from the Middle East

by Steven A. Camarota

National Review
August 30, 2002

When most people think of immigrants today, they think chiefly of those from Latin America or East Asia. But while most immigrants still come from those regions, an increasing number are coming from a less traditional source: the Middle East. The number of Middle Eastern immigrants in the U.S. has grown nearly eightfold from 1970 to 2000, and is expected to double again by 2010. This growth could have significant repercussions for our homeland security — and our support for Israel.

The Center for Immigration Studies has just issued a study of this group of immigrants, based on new Census Bureau data. (We defined the Middle East broadly, as running roughly from Morocco to Pakistan.) While the overall size of the foreign-born population has tripled since 1970 and now stands at 31 million, the number of immigrants from the Middle East has grown more than twice as fast — from fewer than 200,000 in 1970 to nearly 1.5 million in 2000. Of this population roughly 10 percent, or about 150,000, are illegal aliens (based on INS estimates).

The new Middle Eastern immigration is not just more numerous than the old, but also very different in religion. While the Mideast itself is overwhelmingly Muslim, historically this has not been true of the region's immigrants to the U.S. Up until the 1960s, Middle Eastern immigrants were mostly Christian Arabs from Lebanon, or Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and other Christian minorities fleeing predominantly Muslim countries. In 1970, roughly 15 percent of Middle Eastern immigrants were Muslim; by 2000, almost 73 percent were.

Muslim immigrants and their progeny now number some 2 million. Add in today's perhaps 1 million American converts to Islam — mostly blacks — and you have a total Muslim population of about 3 million. The estimates put out by Muslim advocacy groups of 6 or even 12 million Muslims are almost certainly too high, but it is important to note that — absent a change in U.S. immigration policy — they almost certainly will become true.

We know that interest in emigrating to the U.S. remains very strong in the Middle East. Even after the terror attacks, the State Department in October 2001 received some 1.5 million entries from the region for the visa lottery, which awards 50,000 green cards worldwide to those who win a random drawing. Assuming no change in immigration policy, we project that in just the next decade 1.1 million new immigrants (legal and illegal) from the Middle East will settle in the U.S. Looking forward a little further, within less than 20 years the number of Muslim immigrants and their progeny will grow to perhaps 6 million.

What does this immigration mean for the U.S.? To begin with, immigrants from the Middle East are one of the most highly educated groups in America, with almost half having a bachelor's degree, compared with 28 percent of natives; these education levels should make it easier for them to assimilate. Their average income is higher than that of natives. Another positive sign is their high rates of citizenship: Half are U.S. citizens, compared with 38 percent of immigrants overall. One would think that radicalism would have relatively little appeal for this group, but there are troubling indicators as well. In 2000, nearly one in five Middle Eastern immigrants lived in poverty, compared with about one in ten natives, and 23 percent used at least one major welfare program, compared with only 15 percent of natives. Immigration from the Middle East is no longer an entirely elite phenomenon.

Opinion polls indicate that Middle Eastern immigrants are highly dissatisfied with U.S. policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict and wish to see a tilt away from support for Israel. Given this, continued Mideast immigration appears likely to lead to changes in U.S. policy, as elected officials respond to Muslim Americans' growing electoral importance. Their increasing political influence was evident earlier this year when three Democratic House members from Michigan, whose districts contain fast-growing Arab immigrant communities, were among only 21 members voting against a resolution expressing solidarity with Israel against terrorism.

On the domestic level, there are three general areas of concern about this influx into the U.S. First, large-scale Mideast immigration is a cause of overworked American consulates overseas. The State Department, by its own admission, is completely overwhelmed by the numbers. In such an environment, it is much more likely that the wrong person will get a visa. Less immigration, of course, would mean that each applicant could be more carefully scrutinized.

Second, a large Middle Eastern immigrant population makes it easier for Islamic extremists to operate within the U.S. The September 11 hijackers used Middle Eastern immigrant communities for cover. The Washington Post has reported that two 9/11 hijackers who lived in San Diego got help from "mosques and established members of [the city's] Islamic community" to "find housing, open a bank account, obtain car insurance — even, at one point, get a job." The New York Times has observed that one of the many reasons Islamic terrorists prefer Germany as a base is that it's easier to "blend into a society with a large Muslim population."

Third, and perhaps most important, cultural adaptation poses a special problem for Middle Eastern Muslim immigrants. There has been and continues to be a debate within Islam about whether someone can be a good Muslim while living in the land of unbelievers. There is also a debate among Muslims about whether a good Muslim can give his political allegiance to a secular government, such as ours, that is composed of non-Muslims. Many Muslims can and do become loyal Americans; they have served with distinction in the U.S. military. But for some share of Muslims, coming to identify fully with America will be difficult.

And this problem could become more pronounced over time. To date, the way Middle Eastern immigrants have navigated life in the U.S. reflects the group's relatively small size. A modestly sized group has to accommodate itself to American society, because there is not the critical mass necessary in most cities to support institutions that preserve group customs and identity — such as ethnic-based media outlets, schools, or political and social organizations. But this dynamic is changing as the group grows very rapidly as a result of immigration.

The settlement of 1 million new Mideast immigrants by 2010 will overwhelmingly be the result of legal immigration — but levels of legal immigration can be changed by statute. For example, recently proposed legislation to eliminate the visa lottery would reduce Middle Eastern immigration, because many Mideast immigrants have been using this process to obtain their green cards. Alternatively, an amnesty for illegal aliens would increase Mideast immigration, by creating more legal immigrants who could then sponsor their relatives.

Some conservatives have suggested doing away altogether with immigration from the region, at least until the war on terrorism is over. But such proposals are not really worth debating: Even after September 11, not a single member of Congress proposed cutting off Middle Eastern immigration. Congress would never single out one region of the world for exclusion from green cards. Consider Iraq: Although the U.S. was engaged in open hostilities with that country throughout the 1990s, census data show that 68,000 Iraqi immigrants were allowed into the U.S. during that decade. Moreover, all the countries on the State Department's list of sponsors of terrorism are eligible to send immigrants to the U.S. and have in fact sent hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants here over the last ten years. Congress has never questioned the wisdom of permitting this immigration.

We could, of course, scrutinize visa applicants from some countries with greater care than we take in examining those from, say, Switzerland; it is even possible that Congress would curtail temporary visas in the wake of another attack. But it is politically inconceivable, in our equality-obsessed society, that we would ever return to the days prior to 1965 in which some regions of the world were allotted fewer green cards than others.

Reducing legal immigration from the Mideast is a sensible policy, but the only way this could ever happen would be the enactment of an immigration cap that would apply across the board — to all immigrants, wherever they might hail from. The same holds for efforts to deal with illegal immigration: Given limited resources, in a time of war, it makes sense — over the short term — to pursue with special vigor those immigration-law violators who are Middle Easterners. But over the long term, such a policy would be unfair and politically unsustainable. Reducing the overall immigration level is the wisest plan, for the decades to come.

Steven A. Camarota is director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies.