A Decade-Long Fight for Census Recognition Faces a New Threat
For more than a decade, Arab American advocates pushed the federal government to stop counting their community simply as "white" on census forms and instead create a distinct Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) category — one that would finally make visible a population the Arab American Institute estimates has grown nearly 43% since 2010, to roughly 3.7 million people nationwide. In March 2024, that effort scored a landmark win: the Office of Management and Budget formally revised its race and ethnicity standards to add a MENA checkbox and require a combined race-and-ethnicity question on federal forms, with full implementation set for 2029, just ahead of the 2030 census.
Now advocates say that progress is at risk. On September 9, 2026, the Trump administration released a sweeping proposal for how the 2030 census would be conducted — one that, according to NPR's reporting on the plan, would eliminate race and ethnicity questions from the census altogether rather than expand them. The move would also exclude millions of non-citizen residents from the count. Separately, AsAmNews reported in early October that the Census Bureau's new proposal would specifically strike questions on race, ethnicity and sexual orientation from the decennial questionnaire, with officials arguing that a shorter form could improve response rates and that asking about race doesn't serve the census's constitutional head-count purpose.
The practical effect for Arab Americans, should the proposal move forward, would be to undo the 2024 MENA decision before it ever reaches a census form: the community would remain folded into the "white" racial category in federal data, as it has been for decades, with no separate box to check.
In Michigan — home to one of the country's largest and most concentrated Arab American populations, centered in Dearborn and the surrounding Detroit suburbs — that prospect has drawn direct pushback. MLive reported on October 14 that local advocates, including figures tied to the Arab American Heritage Council, warned the rollback would make it harder to identify community needs in areas like health care, housing and economic development, since federal agencies rely on census race and ethnicity data to direct resources and enforce civil rights protections. Advocates in the MLive report framed the MENA fight as part of a longer arc: Arab Americans first sought a distinct category more than a century ago, abandoned that push during World War II-era pressures to assimilate as "white," and revived it in recent decades as data on health disparities, discrimination and economic conditions became harder to track without disaggregated numbers.
The proposal is not final. Federal rulemaking on census methodology typically involves a public comment period, and the OMB's own timeline for MENA implementation had already been pushed back twice this year — from March 2026 to March 2027, then to a final deadline of September 2029 — reflecting how contested and slow-moving this process has been even before the latest proposal surfaced. Civil rights groups including the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights have said they are monitoring the census planning process closely, and the fight over race and ethnicity data has also drawn concern from Native American and Asian American advocacy organizations watching the same proposal.
For now, no final rule has been issued, and the 2030 census questionnaire has not been set. But for a community that spent years lobbying for a line on a government form, the stakes of the next round of federal rulemaking are high.