Syrian Americans
Syrian Americans are Americans of Syrian descent or background. The first significant wave of Syrian immigrants to arrive in the United States began in the 1880s. Many of the earliest Syrian Americans settled in New York City, Boston, and Detroit. Immigration from Syria to the United States suffered a long hiatus after the United States Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted immigration. More than 40 years later, the Immigration Act of 1965, abolished the quotas and immigration from Syria to the United States saw a surge. An estimated 64,600 Syrians immigrated to the United States between 1961 and 2000. Additionally, between 2011 and 2024, amid the Syrian civil war, an estimated 50,004 Syrian refugees immigrated to the United States.
The overwhelming majority of Syrian immigrants to the U.S. from 1880 to 1960 were Christian, a minority were Jewish, whereas Muslim Syrians arrived in the United States chiefly after 1965. According to the 2016 American Community Survey 1-year estimates, there were 187,331 Americans who claimed Syrian ancestry, about 12% of the Arab population in the United States. There are also sizeable minority populations from Syria in the U.S. including Jews, Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, and Circassians.
History
American Revolutionary War
The earliest known Syrian and first Arab to die for the United States was Private Nathan Badeen, an immigrant from Ottoman Syria who died fighting British forces during the American Revolutionary War on May 23, 1776, a month and a half prior to the unanimous signing of the Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 4 of that year.20th century
The first major wave of Syrian immigrants arrived in the United States from Ottoman Syria in the period between 1889 and 1914. A small number were also Palestinians.According to historian Philip Hitti, approximately 90,000 "Syrians" arrived in the United States between 1899 and 1919. An estimated 1,000 official entries per year came from the governorates of Damascus and Aleppo, which are governorates in modern-day Syria, in the period between 1900 and 1916. Early immigrants settled mainly in Eastern United States, in the cities of New York, Boston, Detroit, Cleveland, and the Paterson, New Jersey, area. Until 1899, all migrants from the Ottoman Empire registered as "Turks" when entering the U.S. When "Syrian" became available as a designation at the turn of the 20th century., 3,708 migrants from the region registered as Syrians, only 28 as Turks. In the 1920s, the majority of immigrants from Mount Lebanon began to refer to themselves as Lebanese instead of "Syrians".
Like most immigrants to the U.S., Syrians were motivated to pursue the American Dream of economic success. Many Christian Syrians had immigrated to the U.S. seeking religious freedom and an escape from Ottoman hegemony, and to escape the massacres and bloody conflicts that targeted Christians in particular, after the 1860 Mount Lebanon civil war and the massacres of 1840 and 1845 and the Assyrian genocide. Thousands of immigrants returned to Syria after making money in the United States; these immigrants told tales which inspired further waves of immigrants. Many settlers also sent for their relatives.
File:Downtown-paterson-nj2.jpg|thumb|Paterson, New Jersey, home to the second-largest Syrian American population after New York City
Although the number of Syrian immigrants was not sizable, the Ottoman government set constraints on emigration in order to maintain its populace in Greater Syria. The U.S. Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which greatly reduced Syrian immigration to the United States. However, the quotas were annulled by the Immigration Act of 1965, which opened the doors again to Syrian immigrants. 4,600 Syrians immigrated to the United States in the mid-1960s. Due to the Arab-Israeli and religious conflicts in Syria during this period, many Syrians immigrated to the United States seeking a democratic haven, where they could live in freedom without political suppression. An estimated 64,600 Syrians immigrated to the United States in the period between 1961 and 2000, of which ten percent have been admitted under the refugee acts. Between 2011 and 2015, the U.S. received 1,500 Syrian refugees fleeing the war in their country.
21st century
In 2016, the country received 10,000 more refugees. However, the Trump administration banned Syrian migration to the U.S., as well as the migration of any refugee in 2017.Demography
According to the 2023 American Community Survey, there are 198,731 Americans of Syrian ancestry living in the United States. New York City has the highest concentration of Syrian Americans in the United States. Other urban areas, including Paterson, New Jersey, Allentown, Boston, Cleveland, Dearborn, New Orleans, Toledo, Cedar Rapids, and Houston have large Syrian populations.Assimilation
Pre-1965
The traditional clothing of the first Syrian immigrants in the United States, along with their occupation as peddlers, led to some xenophobia. Scholars such as Oswaldo Truzzi have speculated that this work ultimately helped Syrian integration into the United States by accelerating cultural contact and English language skills. It has been estimated that nearly 80% of first generation Syrian women worked as street merchants. They and their children were often negatively stigmatized as "street Arabs" or inaccurately assumed to be unmarried mothers or prostitutes. In 1907, Congressman John L. Burnett called Syrians "the most undesirable of the undesirable peoples of Asia Minor" and such stigmas appear again in a 1929 survey in Boston that associated Syrians with "lying and deception".File:Syrian restaurant LCCN2014698960.jpg|thumb|270px|Men smoking shisha and playing cards in a Syrian restaurant, Little Syria, 1910
In 1890, the writer Jacob Riis wrote How the Other Half Lives, a book focused on Syrian children, representing the children as pitiful but dangerous. In 1899, the National Conference on Charities declared children engaged in the street market to be equivalent to begging, opening the possibility that women street merchants with children could be deported.
However, Syrians reacted quickly to assimilate fully into their new culture. Immigrants Anglicized their names, adopted the English language and common Christian denominations. Syrians did not congregate in urban enclaves; many of the immigrants who had worked as peddlers were able to interact with Americans on a daily basis. Aside from negative stigmas, the first generation of Syrian migrants also faced romantic stereotyping for their Christian origins. The migrant and writer Mary Amyuni described being advised to describe her home as "the Holy Land" to ease her integration into the United States: "hold up the rosaries and crosses first; say they are from the Holy Land because Americans are very religious". Writers such as Horatio Alger and Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe contributed to the understanding of Syrian migrants as "redeemable peasants". This view pressured Syrians to reject old ways of life as "un-American" and to "accept new ideals".
Immigrant writers often balanced an adopted culture with a home culture, such as in Ameen Rihani's 1911 "The Book of Khalid", which revolved around an imagined Arabic text inscribed with images of skyscrapers and pyramids. Others argued for the possibility of both identities in public discourse, including Syrian academic Abbas Bajjani, who wrote that "inhabiting two separate worlds—physically and socially—was not only possible but actually desirable, since it was the only hope for the salvation, edification, and modernization of "Syria".
Additionally, military service during World War I and World War II helped accelerate assimilation. Assimilation of early Syrian immigrants was so successful that it has become difficult to recognize the ancestors of many families which have become completely Americanized.
Religion
Christian Syrians arrived in the United States in the late 19th century. Most Christian Syrian Americans are Greek Orthodox, Eastern Catholic, and Syriac Orthodox. There are also many Catholic Syrian Americans; most branches of Catholicism are of the Eastern rite, such as Maronite Catholics, Melkite Greek Catholics, Armenian Catholics, Syrian Catholics, and the Assyrian Chaldean Catholics. A few Christian Syrian Americans are Protestant. There are also members of the Assyrian Church of the East and Ancient Church of the East. The first Syrian American church was founded in Brooklyn, New York in 1895 by Saint Raphael of Brooklyn. There are currently hundreds of Eastern Orthodox churches and missions in the United States.The first wave of Syrian religious communities in the United States established ninety Maronite, Melkite, and Eastern Orthodox churches across the country by 1920, many establishing firm contrasts between themselves and American Christian faiths such as the Episcopalians or Catholics. Historian Naff writes that as a broad global diaspora threatened the Syrian identity, the preservation of its religious traditions became increasingly important.
Muslim Syrians arrived in the United States chiefly after 1965. The largest sect in Islam is the Sunni sect, forming 74% of the Muslim Syrian population, of whom 12% are ethnic Kurds and 5% Turks. The second largest sect in Islam in Syria is the Alawite sect, a religious sect that originated in Shia Islam but separated from other Shiite Islam groups in the ninth and tenth centuries.
Druze form the third largest sect in Syria, which is a relatively small esoteric monotheistic religious sect. Early Syrian immigrants included Druze peddlers. The United States is the second largest home of Druze communities outside Western Asia after Venezuela. According to some estimates, there are about 30,000 to 50,000 Druze in the United States, with the largest concentration in Southern California. Most Druze immigrated to the U.S. from Lebanon and Syria.
Syrian Jews first arrived in the United States around 1908 and settled mostly in New York. Initially they lived on the Lower East Side; later settlements were in Bensonhurst and Ocean Parkway in Flatbush, Brooklyn. The Syrian Jewish community estimates its population at around 50,000. Jewish organizations have assisted Syrian refugees by providing various services in Northern New Jersey.