After 1965, US foreign policy displaced domestic racial hierarchies in shaping Arab-American identity.

Evidence

But when the immigration laws changed again in that year, abandoning the quota system that had favored European immigrants, the community grew substantially with new arrivals. … Now, unlike in the earlier periods of Arab-American history, it will be American foreign policy and its designs on the Middle East—and not America’s domestic ethnic or racial hierarchies—that define the parameters of Arab American life. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 981

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth tracing when and how this shift to foreign-policy-defined identity actually landed in everyday Arab-American experience.