Coming To America … And Becoming Arab

The New York Times reports today that identification with an Arab ethnicity is on the rise among immigrants from the Middle East.

The numbers, of course, are in dispute. The Census Bureau has recently reported 1.2 million Americans of Arab descent, while the Arab interest groups claim about 3 million. Since Arabs do not (yet) have any “official classification like the one used to count Hispanics,” the NYT observes, “establishing ethnicity relies heavily on self-identification.”

Now that that “self-identification” is increasing, can “official classification” be far behind? For example, as I discussed here, why should the flagship university in Michigan, home of a large and growing Arab-American community, give preferences to applicants who are “Mexican American” or “Puerto Rican and raised on the U.S. mainland” but not to Lebanese-Americans? (While I’m at it, why do only Mexican-Americans and Puerto Rican-Americans provide “diversity”? Why not Cuban-Americans, Honduran-Americans, Filipino-Americans, etc., etc.?)

The article focuses on one large Lebanese-American family in Ohio. The first generation, as was typical of most immigrants, strove to assimilate, and succeeded. The second and third generations thought of themselves as American, or white, or Lebanese-American. Some in the current generation, for the first time, identify as Arab-American, with one recent Cornell graduate, now an employee of the Arab American Institute, saying that “she has become ‘the professional Arab-American’ in the family.”

Thus, just as Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Filipino-Americans, etc., did not begin to think of themselves as “Asian” until they had been forged in the fires of American ethnic politics, so it would appear that the Lebanese have to come to America to become “Arab.”

But there is an interesting problem lurking in the predictable future effort to grant “official” recognition to Arab-American identity, a problem that was totally ignored in the NYT article: religion. The article does mention that the largest group of Arab-Americans are of Lebanese descent, “accounting for 37 percent of the population.” Although the article does not say, I suspect that most of the Lebanese-Americans are Christian. (The article does mention in passing the Coury family’s “Maronite church.”)

What if, recognizing the new reality, the University of Michigan did begin to award preferences to “Arab-Americans,” but all the preferences went to Christian Lebanese-Americans. How would that sit? Would the university have to make sure that a sufficient (proportional?) number went to Muslim Arab-Americans? Could it constitutionally do that?

Why not? As I’ve been arguing here for a while, if it can discriminate on the basis of race, there would seem to be no good reason why it couldn’t also discriminate on the basis of religion.