Middle Eastern Americans
| Regions with significant populations | |
|---|---|
| Continental United States, smaller populations in Alaska and Hawaii | |
| Languages | |
| English • Arabic • Aramaic • Azerbaijani • Armenian • Greek • Hebrew • Persian • Turkish • Semitic languages · Afro-Asiatic · | |
| Religion | |
|
Christianity: (Eastern Orthodoxy · Catholicism) Islam · Judaism · Druze · Zoroastrianism · Mandaeism · Yezidism · Agnosticism · Deism |
Middle Eastern Americans are Americans with ancestry or citizenship from the Middle East.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the term "Middle Eastern American" applies to anyone of Western Asian and North African (Middle Eastern) extraction. This definition includes both indigenous Middle Eastern groups in diaspora (e.g. American Jews, Kurdish Americans, Assyrian Americans, Coptic Americans etc.) and current immigrants from modern-day countries of the Arab League, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cyprus, Iran, Israel and Turkey. Middle Eastern communities have been settling in America since at least the Dutch colonial period of New Amsterdam, when Sephardic Jews fleeing persecution in Brazil found refuge there in 1654.
The population of Middle Eastern Americans totals at least 10 million, combining the estimates for the Arab-American (3.7 million) and the Jewish-American (6.5 million) populations alone. This comes to more than 3.1% of the 318 million people in the US as of 2014.
The population of Middle-Eastern Americans includes both Arabs and non-Arabs. In their definitions of Middle Eastern Americans, U.S. Census Bureau and the National Health Interview Survey include peoples (diasporic or otherwise) from present day Armenia, Cyprus, Iran, Israel, Turkey, and Central Asia.
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