Early Levantine immigrants were deemed inassimilable non-Whites due to Muslim affiliation

Evidence

When immigrants from the Levant slowly began to arrive at the turn of the twentieth century in pursuit of economic opportunity, their affiliation with Islam (either as Muslims or as Christians governed by Muslim rulers) deemed them inassimilable non-Whites. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 484

Categorization

• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone into immigration history: even Levantine Christians were racialized as non-White because they lived under Muslim rulers.
• XREF: connects to: Islamic identity exceeded skin color in rendering Arabs non-white for citizenship; The 1924 Asiatic Barred Zone placed nearly all Muslims outside admissible whiteness; Arab ethnicity is defined by language and culture, not religion (+2 more)