During the 250th anniversary of the United States of America, this Arab American Heritage Month is a good time to reflect on the history of Arab immigration to America and the community’s centuries-long continuous presence here.

During America’s first century, just a trickle of immigrants came from the Arab world, leaving a handful of colourful anecdotes: an Arab immigrant who fought in the Revolutionary War and a North African Arab who settled in North Carolina in the early 18th century.

But in the 1880s, larger groups of Arab immigrants began arriving. Like their southern European counterparts, they sought employment opportunities in the mill towns of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Midwestern states. Most emigrated from areas of the Ottoman Empire known today as Syria and Lebanon.

Like other ethnic immigrant communities, they settled near extended family and friends from the villages or cities from which they came and built places of worship to establish themselves in their new communities. Maronite Catholic and Syrian or Greek Orthodox Christian communities dot Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York, all dating back to the 19th century. America’s first mosques were also founded around this time in North Dakota and Iowa by Lebanese Muslim immigrants.

Emigration from the Mount Lebanon region spiked during the........

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