Arab diaspora


Arab diaspora refers to descendants of the Arab immigrants who, voluntarily or as refugees, emigrated from their native lands to non-Arab countries, primarily in Central America, South America, Europe, North America, and parts of South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and West Africa.

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. About 3 million Brazilians of Arab descent are Syrians. Most others Brazilians of Arab descent are mainly from Palestine, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Other large Arab communities include Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, 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 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.
It has been estimated that there are as many as four million Indonesians with at least partial Arab ancestry. They are generally well-integrated socially with Indonesian society, and identify predominantly as Indonesians, with an Arab heritage. In the 2005 census, approximately 87,000 people, amounting to 0.04% of the population, identified themselves as being of Arab ethnicity. According to Al-Rabithah al-Alawiyyah, there are about 1.2 million Indonesians of paternal Sayyid descent.

Notable people

Prominent members of the Arab diaspora include:

Business