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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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