Introduction 20 table 1.1. Estimated number of persons identified as Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni in the host-country Yemenis Libyans Syrians Self-Identified Ancestry, USa Foreign Born, England and Walesc 29,358 ~9,000b 147,426 15,046d 17,774 8,848 a Data from the 2010 American Community Survey, country of ancestry. These figures are the combined totals of persons who listed Yemeni or Syrian as a first or second entry. b This figure was quoted to me by an advocate for the Libyan American community, but a surveyderived estimate is unavailable. The ancestry data for the 2000 census and the 2010 American Community Survey contain no data on the Libyan-American population.14 c Data from the 2011 Ethnic Group census for England and Wales, Office of National Statistics (www.nomisweb.co.uk/census/2011/QS211EW/view/2092957703?rows=cell&cols=rural_urban). d The BBC writes that there are “an estimated 70–80,000 Yemenis living in Britain, who form the longest-established Muslim group in Britain” but does not cite a source for these figures (www.bbc .co.uk/religion/religions/islam/history/uk_1.shtml). and interests for over a century.15 The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, led policymakers in both the United States and Britain to instigate a global war on terror that turned inward, increasing community-wide profiling, surveillance, detention, and deportation of Arabs and Muslims (Brighton 2007). Because these host-countries provide similar “contexts of reception” for Middle Easterners (Bloemraad 2006), they provide contextual similarities that can help clarify why diaspora mobilization varies in substantive ways for the same national group across host-countries. I was able to conduct interviews with Yemeni and Libyan activists after their heads of state had been deposed and the revolutionary movements ostensibly ended in 2012 and 2013, respectively. I conducted a total of sixty-eight interviews for the Libyan case during the post-Gaddafi transition period, which led me to Tripoli in pursuit of the repatriated. I had hoped to do the same with Syrian activists, but the uprising in Syria never reached the same stage. After conducting fieldwork with this community since 2011, I made the strategic decision to conduct interviews in 2014, seventy-nine in total, as the uprising turned into a multisided internationalized civil war and produced a major 14 15 According to Neal Conon, host of Talk of the Nation on National Public Radio, “We don’t really know how many Libyans live in the US because there aren’t enough to be classified in the census” (National Public Radio 2011). Despite their categorization as white in the United States, Middle Easterners have often been treated as second-class citizens and lumped together as Arab-Muslim Others despite their ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity (Cainkar 2009, 2018; Maghbouleh 2017; Naber 2012). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press