March 28th, 2024

Announcement: US Census to add Middle Eastern, North African category

East Meets West Senior Advisors, alongside our coalition partners, have been working for over a decade to get Middle Eastern, Southwest Asian, North African, and South Asian (MENASA/SWANASA) added to the U.S. census and federal government forms and welcome the Biden Administrations approved proposals to have “Middle Eastern or North African” added to future response options. 

​​Although we still have a long way to go in our pursuit for socioeconomic equity, this is a first step in the right direction as for the first time, Americans who trace their ancestral roots to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) will have their own category on the decennial survey.

When speaking to Aljazeera many of our community members welcomed this first step as “transformative,” including Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute (AAI) stated, who has for years advocated for this update.

“For more than four decades, dating back to the foundation of our organization, we have highlighted that there is no accurate count of our community because a checkbox did not exist on federal data collection forms, particularly the census,” she said.

“It’s incredibly significant and will have a very real and tangible impact on people’s lives.”

In the US, official counts of populations have wide-ranging impacts, affecting how federal dollars are disbursed to meet the needs of certain communities, how congressional districts are drawn, and how certain federal anti-discrimination and racial equity laws are enforced.

The Biden administration has approved proposals for a new response option for "Middle Eastern or North African" and a "Hispanic or Latino" box that appears under a reformatted question that asks: "What is your race and/or ethnicity?"

Going forward, participants in federal surveys will be presented with at least seven "race and/or ethnicity" categories, along with instructions that say: "Select all that apply."

After years of research and discussion by federal officials for a complicated review process that goes back to 2014, the decision was announced Thursday in a Federal Register notice, which was made available for public inspection before its official publication.

Officials at the White House's Office of Management and Budget revived these Obama-era proposals after they were shelved by the Trump administration. Supporters of these changes say they could help the racial and ethnic data used to redraw maps of voting districts, enforce civil rights protections and guide policymaking and research better reflect people's identities today.

"These revisions will enhance our ability to compare information and data across federal agencies, and also to understand how well federal programs serve a diverse America," Karin Orvis, U.S. chief statistician within OMB, said in a blog post.

Abed Ayoub, executive director of The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, hailed the update as a much-needed “first step”.

“This has been a long time coming,” Ayoub told Al Jazeera. “We feel that this resets the conversation on the issue.”

“Before, we were completely ignored. We had no category. The conversation moving forward will be ‘How do we refine this category, revise this category over the years to ensure that it is a representative and fair category?'”

Changes to how such data is collected are infrequent, with the last update coming in 1997. President Barack Obama proposed new standards for the US Census’s methodology, but President Donald Trump delayed their implementation.

Like Ayoub, AAI’s Berry also noted that the reception of the new standards has been somewhat muted, saying more testing should have been conducted to refine the subcategories included in the MENA category to better reflect the US population.

She pointed to the absence of a specific subcategory for groups like Black Arabs, who hail from across the Middle East, as an example.

“Typically we would be in a place where we should just be celebrating the new category,” she said. “And regrettably … We’re having to sort of worry a bit more about how we make sure it doesn’t produce a continued undercount of our community.”

Still, Berry said, the US is a step closer to a system of data collection that reflects the country’s diversity, and that is vital.

“Governments, state governments, local authorities, everybody requires data in order to be able to do almost every single aspect of the way they provide services to citizens,” she said. “There’s literally nothing that the multitrillion-plus-dollar federal budget is not impacted by in terms of the federal data collection.”

Most people living in the U.S. are not expected to see the changes on the census until forms for the next once-a-decade head count of the country's residents are distributed in 2030 but we welcome this significant change that will hopefully empower to #CountUsAllIn for a better tomorrow.