Exit from Authoritarianism 45 As a matter of practice, Middle Easterners have been treated as racially and culturally inferior – as “yellow” Asians, morally and politically suspect Turks, or as members of the “brown” race – throughout their history (Cainkar 2018; Jamal and Naber 2008; Naber 2014). Because the ability to naturalize was tied to being white, Syrian Christians in the United States fought for this recognition, eventually gaining permission to naturalize and vote in the 1910s. After extensive battles in the courts, Yemenis were not granted permission to do the same until the 1940s. In 1965, governments in the United States and Britain struck down overly restrictive migration policies and readjusted country-specific quotas. In combination with push factors – political instability, stifling economic immobility, and state-sponsored scholarships – Libyans joined their counterparts from Yemen and a recently independent Syrian nation during this period in search of opportunities abroad. As is the case for any diaspora, the political voice and visibility of these national groups was indelibly shaped by geopolitical circumstances. After the 1967 Arab–Israeli war and amid the tumult of global protests in the 1960s, members of these communities joined labor movements and panArab associations to contest Zionism, imperialism, and discrimination (Shain 1996). Likewise, they also became subjected to heightened degrees of surveillance and persecution as potential Palestinian insurgents and communists for decades afterward (Pennock 2017). Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Arab and Muslim immigrants were further subjected to mandatory special registration, mass arrests, secret and indefinite detentions, wiretapping, and visits by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Cainkar 2009; Howell and Shryock 2003; Naber 2006; Staeheli and Nagel 2008). Taken together, these populations’ transnational ties have been used to indict them as enemies of the state and as potential terrorists (Nagel 2002). In light of these historical circumstances, this chapter investigates how emigrants and refugees from Libya, Syria, and Yemen mobilized for change in their home-countries from the United States and Britain before the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. After providing the requisite contextual background, I focus in depth on their anti-regime mobilizations during the periods of authoritarian rule that became the impetus for the 2011 uprisings. For Libyans, this began in 1969 after Muammar al-Gaddafi overthrew Libya’s King Idris. In Syria, Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970, with his son Bashar appointed through manipulated elections after Hafez’s death in 2000. In Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh came to power in 1978, first in North Yemen (the Yemen Arab Republic, YAR) before becoming president of the modern-day Republic of Yemen that joined north and south (formerly the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, PDRY). As this chapter illustrates, repression and economic hardship in their homecountries had forced many regime opponents into exile from authoritarian rule. The dislocation of varied oppositionists, from political elites to grassroots https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press