Arabs in Foreign Lands

People of Arab descent living in the United States are doing far better than the average American. That is the surprising conclusion drawn from data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2000 and released last March. The census found that U.S. residents who report having Arab ancestors are better educated and wealthier than average Americans.

Whereas 24 percent of Americans hold college degrees, 41 percent of Arab Americans are college graduates. The median income for an Arab family living in the United States is $52,300-4.6 percent higher than other American families -- and more than half of all Arab Americans own their home. Forty-two percent of people of Arab descent in the United States work as managers or professionals, while the same is true for only 34 percent of the general U.S. population. For many, this success has come on quickly: Although about 50 percent of Arab Americans were born in the United States, nearly half of those born abroad did not arrive until the 1990s.

That immigrants do better than their compatriots back home is of course no surprise. What is far less common is for immigrants to perform that much better than the average population of their adopted home. This fact should prompt important debates that transcend how Arab immigrants are faring in the United States.

Consider, for example, the popular notion that cultural factors loom large behind the Middle East's appalling poverty. Cultural explanations for why some succeed when others fail have a long history. In 1904, German sociologist Max Weber famously argued that the "Protestant ethic" was more compatible with capitalism than religions such as Confucianism and Taoism. Of course, the Asian economic miracle forced a revision of these assumptions. The same thing happened to "Asian values," the idea that cultural factors explained the region's phenomenal rates of economic growth. The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s gave that cultural theory an even shorter shelf life.

The Middle East's poor economic and social performance today has also prompted explanations of some malignancy in the prevailing culture. The respected Harvard University historian David S. Landes wrote in his 1998 book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, that the ill that plagues these countries "lies with the culture, which (1) does not generate an informed and capable work force; (2) continues to mistrust or reject new techniques and ideas that come from the enemy West (Christendom) and (3) does not respect such knowledge as members do manage to achieve."

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