Palestinian Americans
Palestinian Americans (Arabic: فلسطينيو أمريكا) are Americans who are of full or partial Palestinian descent. It is unclear when the first Palestinian immigrants arrived in the United States, but it is believed that they arrived during the early 1900s.
Numbering 170,000 individuals, the Palestinian community in the United States is small, making up less than half a tenth of a percent of the U.S. population. However, this number could be underestimated as Palestinian Americans may consider themselves as just Arab (600,000 people identify themselves as "Arab" or "Other Arab" on the Census), or some Palestinian immigrants with less immersion in the English language may not be able to fill out the Census form with accurate information. There is not an Arab or Middle Eastern/North African (MENA) category on the Census, though this notion has been considered.
The Palestinian community is concentrated in the New York City, Houston, Chicago, and Detroit metropolitan areas, with other populations in the Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan areas. Some Palestinians have emigrated to smaller metropolitan or micropolitan/rural areas such as Gallup, New Mexico, in the late 20th and 21st century.
Demographics[edit]
U.S cities[edit]
Most Palestinians settled in the areas surrounding Paterson,[6][7] and Bay Ridge,[8] which together make up the New York Metropolitan Area. Many other Palestinians settled in the Houston metropolitan area, while some others settled in the Chicago metropolitan area, Los Angeles metro area, Metro Detroit, Greater Cleveland, Metro New Orleans, Metro Jacksonville, and Metro Miami.
Paterson, New Jersey, has its southern half of the city nicknamed Little Ramallah, with an Arab American population estimated as high as 20,000 in 2015.[9] It has the most concentrated area of Palestinian Americans in the entire United States.[10] It is also called Little Istanbul, since it also has a growing Turkish American community.
Bay Ridge's Arab community in Brooklyn, New York, is also a significant neighborhood home to an estimated population of 35,000,[11] in which its largest Arab ethnic groups are Palestinians and Yemenis.[8][12] However, it is also home to many other Arab ethnic groups, making Bay Ridge's Arab community also a strongly diverse population.