Among the least studied ethnic groups in the United States
are those with roots in historically Islamic countries, including the Middle
East. In part this is because there
is no recognized common identity for this population group – neither a
generally accepted name nor a common description. Another reason is that historically this group was very small,
and only in the last two decades, as a result of the same increase in
immigration that brought so many more Hispanics and Asians into the country,
has their number risen into the millions.
The one characteristic that is shared is the Muslim
religion. However, many Muslims do
not have a race or geographic origin in common. In addition, because of the separation of church and state in
the United States, census data are not collected on religious affiliations. The argument for creating a separate
category for the persons we call Muslim-origin is similar to that made for
persons of Hispanic descent: they are a diverse population group having some
language and cultural characteristics in common. Like Hispanics, the people we call Muslim-origin can be of any
race. Many are white but there also
are many of black and other racial descent.
Like Hispanics, we select geographic origins and identify people from
these places as an ethnic group.
This study is the latest in a series of Mumford
Center reports about the growing racial and ethnic diversity of American
society. It describes a population
that we associate generally with Muslim regions of the world, based on geography. We include the following range of
countries of birth and ancestry: North Africa, the Middle East, Iran, and
several South Asian and Southeast Asian countries with Muslim
majorities. We will use the term
Muslim-origin to refer to Americans with roots in these places, whether by
birth or ancestry. The coding
assignment used to identify the Muslim-origin population in each of the
census data files and allocate them into geographic regions is described at
the end of this report.
Counting Metropolitan Americans from the
Muslim World
The 1990 5% Public Use Micro
Sample (1990 PUMS) data files and the Census 2000 1% Public Micro Sample
(2000 PUMS) allow us to count the number of Americans with roots in
Muslim-origin countries by combining information on their birth and ancestry. The reader should bear in mind, however,
that these are sample estimates, rather than population enumerations. In 2000, almost 2.9 million people from
Muslim-origin countries were counted among the U.S. population. This represents an increase of over 1.3
million people and a growth rate of 85 percent since the last decennial
census. These numbers are summarized
in Table 1.
Among the four geographic regions, Table 1 shows that the
Middle East is the largest contributor, with almost half of the 2000
Muslim-origin population reporting place of birth or ancestries from this
region. But its percentage of the
Muslim-origin total has slipped slightly since 1990. Almost one quarter of the Muslim-origin
population is now South Asian, and this group showed the largest percent
increase since 1990 (a growth rate of over 130 percent).
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