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Recruiting
Arab American Voters
By Leila Kawar
On Saturday mornings, Sahadi Importing company on Atlantic Avenue
resembles an Arabic souq, or marketplace, as people from all over
the city line up with wire shopping baskets in hand to scoop up
spices and dried fruit and shop the shelves for Middle Eastern
specialties like pickled Z’atar leaf and thin, hot peppers
in brine.
Outside the bustle of morning shopping, fresh-faced young
professionals have set up a portable table covered with a traditional
black-and-white
checked Arab headdress and are passing out leaflets that announce
the second annual Network of
Arab American Professionals (NAAP)
voter registration drive.
The twenty-somethings
like Sarab Aljijakli and Amal Elsheemy, two of the founders of
NAAP, are part of Arab immigrant children who grew up
as Americans but found that the Arab American community
lacked the institutions necessary for fully participating in the
political process in the city.
“Looking around New York, Arabs have no presence in local
politics," Aljijakli
said. “We are a diverse community, and people own lots
of businesses and are willing to get involved in the business
community,
but not in politics. Arab-Americans have lots of things they
want to discuss with other Americans but they can usually only
preach.
We’re trying to change that.”
More than 100,000
immigrants from the Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle
East have come to New York City over the past
20 years, with immigration from these countries increasing
by 67
percent in the 1990s alone. NAAP’s voter registration
efforts have been targeted at these recent immigrants and their
families, most
of whom are citizens but know very little about the voting
process.
Over the past two years, Aljijakli and Elsheemy have
recruited their peers to help register new voters. As Aljijakli
notes,
getting new immigrants to participate in the political process
has been
challenging. “It has been hard to win people’s
trust,” he
said. “They distrust politics but if you keep coming
back regularly they get used to you and are willing to listen
to what
we have to say.”
The NAAP campaign began on Atlantic
Avenue in the months ahead of last November’s congressional
election, and this fall the organizers have expanded their
efforts to cover the Arab
section of Atlantic Avenue as well as Arab neighborhoods in
Astoria, Yonkers,
Paterson, Bay Ridge and Jersey City.
NAAP's voter registration drive is the first community-organized
effort with a strategy for reaching Arab-Americans across the entire
New York area.It might seem that Arab-Americans should have joined
the ranks
of organized ethnic identity groups some time ago. After all,
Arabic-speaking
immigrants have been coming to New York since the 1860s.
But
as sociologist Anny Bakalian, who works at CUNY’s
Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center, explained,
although they
shared a common cultural heritage, few of the early immigrants
would have identified themselves as Arabs.
“If asked, these immigrants, many of whom were Orthodox
Christians from the Levant, identified first with their family,
next with their village or town
and thirdly with their sect,” Bakalian said.
Although their “whiteness” was
initially contested and was only settled by an awkward 1915 court decision
that allowed immigrants from the Eastern Mediterranean
to become citizens on account of their membership in the “Semitic
branch of the Caucasian race”, the initial wave of Arabic-speaking
immigrants and their descendants assimilated relatively quickly into
the melting
pot of white Christian America.
Immigration to the United States from
the Middle East was more or less cut-off between the First and Second
World Wars and started to pick
up again after
1967 when university-educated professionals who were frustrated by
Middle East political
instability started to emigrated in large numbers.
Newcomers from
North Africa, the Gulf States, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine,
Syria and Lebanon are more likely to be Muslim and are
more diverse in
socioeconomic background, and they may have a harder time passing
for “white” than
did immigrants a century earlier. Many have also been influenced
by the post-colonial politics of the region, in particular by Arab
nationalism.
Whether Christian
or Muslim, many are troubled by U.S. foreign policy towards the Arab
nations over the last 40 years, views that they have passed on to
their children.
“After 9/11, everyone found themselves being treated as
Arabs whether they thought of themselves that way or not, " Aljijakli
explains. "And then
there was a common feeling that if you were walking down the street
and heard Arabic being spoken you’d want to say hello, marhaba,
ahlan wasahlan, regardless of which country the person was from.”
Indeed,
NAAP attracts recent Arab immigrants but it also draws its membership
from the children of the early immigrants, many
of whom
are now more likely
to see their identity as Arab and to work for their ethnic community
and the causes
of their people in the old homelands.
For young professionals like
Mr. Aljijakli, almost as important as registering recent immigrants
to vote is the effort to organize
the
community politically
so that it can make its concerns known to the general public.
The
aftermath of the events of 9/11, particularly the special registration
program for non-citizens from certain countries as well as the
FBI’s “voluntary
interview” program that targeted immigrants from these same
countries, has galvanized a new generation of rights-conscious
Arab-Americans. As Ms. Elsheemy
puts it, “It’s the ‘Oh I didn’t know you
were Arab’ or ‘But
you don’t look Arab’ that we need to take advantage
of. If we can’t
represent for our people who will.”
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