Arab diaspora

Overview

Arab expatriates contribute to the circulation of financial and human capital in the region and thus significantly promote regional development. In 2009 Arab countries received a total of US$35.1 billion in remittance in-flows and remittances sent to Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon from other Arab countries are 40 to 190 per cent higher than trade revenues between these and other Arab countries. Large numbers of Arabs migrated to West Africa, particularly Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Nigeria. Since the end of the civil war in 2002, Lebanese traders have become re-established in Sierra Leone.

According to Saudi Aramco World, the largest concentration of Arabs outside the Arab World is in Brazil, which has 9 million Brazilians of Arab ancestry. Of these 9 million Arabs, 6 million are of Lebanese ancestry, making Brazil's population of Lebanese equivalent to that of Lebanon itself. However, these figures are contradicted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), which is the agency responsible for official collection of statistical information in Brazil. According to the 2010 Brazilian census conducted by IBGE, there were only 12,336 Lebanese nationals living in Brazil and other Arab nationalities were so small that they were not even listed. The Brazilian census does not ask about ancestry or family origin. There is a question about nationality and, according to the Brazilian law, any person born in Brazil is a Brazilian national by birth and right for any purpose, nationally or internationally — not an Arab. The last Brazilian census to ask about family origin was conducted in 1940. At that time, 107,074 Brazilians said they had a Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi or Arab father. Native Arabs were 46,105 and naturalized Brazilians were 5,447. In 1940, Brazil had 41,169,321 inhabitants, hence Arabs and their children were 0.38% of Brazil's population in 1940.

Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico and Chile. Palestinians cluster in Chile and Central America, particularly El Salvador, and Honduras. The Palestinian community in Chile is the fourth largest in the world after those in Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan. Arab Haitians (a large number of whom live in the capital) are more often than not, concentrated in financial areas where the majority of them establish businesses. In the United States, there are around 3.5 million people of Arab ancestry.

In the 2010 Indonesian census, 118,886 people, amounting to 0.05% of the population of Indonesia, identified themselves as being of Arab ethnicity.

There is also a small community of Yemeni Arabs in Hyderabad city of Telangana state in India who were brought from Hadhramaut region of Yemen to serve as army men during Nizam's rule. They are called the Chaush community. There is also presence of a tiny Iraqi refugee/immigrant community in India.

References

Notes Citations

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