2 Exit from Authoritarianism While Middle Easterners have been depicted as recent arrivals to the West, the United States and Britain have served as notable receiving countries for these populations for well over a century (Cainkar 2013). Factors pulling emigrants to these countries have included educational and employment opportunities, labor recruitment, and colonial ties between the United Kingdom and southern Yemen. The first major wave of emigrants – consisting primarily of Christians from greater Syria and sailors from British-held parts of Yemen – began in the 1880s. While some of these immigrants experienced newfound peace and prosperity in their host-societies, they were also subjected to ghettoization, nativist violence, and discrimination. Their arrival to port cities such as New York and South Shields in England continued until restrictive immigration quotas and travel bans were imposed in the aftermath of World War I (Bozorgmehr et al. 1996; Gualtieri 2020; Hooglund 1987; Jacobs 2015). By virtually banning migration from Asian countries and the former Ottoman Empire, migration slowed to a trickle.1 The United States and Britain provided similar “contexts of reception” for emigrants from the region for much of this period. Although persons from the Middle East and North Africa have been classified in the US Census as “white” – and one had to be white in order to naturalize in the United States from the Naturalization Act of 1790 until 1952 – their whiteness has been marginal and probationary at best across the western world (Maghbouleh 2017). 1 As migration expert Sarah Gualtieri (2020: 146) writes, the first wave of emigrants from greater Syria to the United States began in the 1800s and continued until the US Immigration Act of 1924; the second wave occurred during the interwar period but was hampered by quotas and restrictions; and the third was marked by major wars in the region, especially over the state of Israel and the subsequent Palestinian refugee crisis. 44 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press