Early Arab immigrants were simultaneously exoticized and despised by Americans

Evidence

The foreign population in the lower part of this city has of late years been increased by the Arabic-speaking element from the Lebanon, in Syria,” it begins. “In clannishness and outlandish manners these people resemble the Chinese and what are called the Diego Italians. Nearly all of them are Maronite [Christians], and in many respects they are inferior to the Chinese and Italians, who do possess a certain amount of self-respect and are willing to work honestly and work hard for a living.” The comments seem antiquarian today (“Diego Italians”?), but what we find here, between exoticism and chauvinism, is precisely the nation’s early-twentieth-century spirit, which welcomed and reviled foreigners simultaneously. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 977

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — both document how mainstream American/European culture framed immigrants as simultaneously alluring and inferior. — connects to: American Orientalism couples inherited European alienness claims with produced Arab stereotypes. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 204
• SEED: Angle: the ‘welcomed and reviled simultaneously’ dyad as a recurring American pattern across successive immigrant waves — from Syrians in 1890 to Latin Americans today.