Census Bureau Takes First Look at Arabs in U.S.
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The Census Bureau released its first detailed report of the Arab population in the United States based on the 2000 census. The number of Arabs in the United States doubled in the last two decades, going from 610,000 in 1980 to 1.2 million in 2000.
About half of all people with Arab ancestry lived in five states in 2000: California, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey and New York. These states accounted for 31 percent of the entire U.S. population in 2000. Michigan had the highest proportion of Arabs, accounting for 1.2 percent of the population in the state. New Jersey and Massachusetts followed, with Arabs making up 0.9 percent and 0.8 percent of those states’ population, respectively.