Inside The Campaign To Help Make Arab-American Businesses More Competitive

Calls are mounting for the US government to officially classify businesses owned by Arab-Americans as “disadvantaged” to help them remain competitive in the face of frequent discrimination.

By declaring Arab-owned businesses as disadvantaged, they would become eligible for assistance from the US Department of Commerce’s Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), which gives minority-owned businesses greater access to capital, government contracts and assistance in reaching markets for exports.

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At the moment, however, the MBDA primarily deals with businesses owned by African, Asian or Hispanic-Americans, Hasidic Jews, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders.

Since 2009, however, the Washington DC-based American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) has been calling on Arab-American businesses to be included.

According to Abed Ayoub, the ADC’s director of legal and policy affairs, the campaign is gathering steam as the US heads to the November election between President Donald Trump and Democratic hopeful Joe Biden.

Today is Buy MBE Day! There is still time to support your local minority-owned businesses → https://t.co/6YXGhgw6pV #BuyMBEDay #ShopMBEDay2020 pic.twitter.com/XcUmh2TMy7— USMBDA (@USMBDA) September 19, 2020

“We want pledges from both campaigns to have a serious look at designating Arab-American business owners as disadvantaged minorities,” he said.  “That gives us the opportunity to bid on more government contracts open up more revenue [opportunities] and streams of funding.”

Ayoub added that while the Barack Obama administration pledged to undertake a ‘disparity study’ before making a final decision, to date that has been no moves towards recognition since he left the White House.

“The Trump administration did not even bother responding to us,” he said.

As our Muslim friends and neighbors mark the start of the Islamic New Year and honor the sacrifice made during the holy month of #Muharram, let us all recommit to standing together in the struggle for compassion, equality, and justice.— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 21, 2020

Joe Biden’s campaign, on the other hand, has pledged to at least look into the issue.

In a platform released earlier this year that addressed specific domestic and foreign policy issues that are of interest to Arab-American voters, the campaign vowed to “commission an independent study that will make recommendations on possible additional categories of socially disadvantaged groups, such as MENA, for purposes of ensuring equitable access to federal procurement opportunities.”

While Ayoub said that the ADC “understands it’s difficult to nail down a timeline, the organisation is confident that the Biden campaign will “be working with us from day 1 to begin implementing the initial steps.”

Abed Ayoub, ADC’s director of legal and policy affairs

The impact on Arab-American businesses, he explained, would be "huge."

"They'd be able to get more revenue, better funding and different opportunities to help overcome the discrimination a lot of these business owners face." 

The ugly face of discrimination

While Ayoub said that discrimination against Arab-American owned businesses takes many forms, the most common is that they lose business from potential customers and clients with anti-Arab – and often anti-Muslim – sentiments.

“Let’s say you have an Arab business owner who owns a sanitation company, and he wants to bid on a contract to clean a government contract,” he explained. “He’s bidding against other companies owned by, for example, ‘John Smith’, or white-owned companies.”

“If they want to bid on a local contract, they [the potential clients] are going to look at the name ‘Mohammed’ and won’t want to deal with him as an Arab,” Ayoub added. “There is discrimination, and it’s a real problem, and they’re losing out on opportunities and funding because of it.”

This form of discrimination against Arab-American owned businesses, Ayoub said, has also resulted in a flight of business owners and other professionals to hubs which are already home to larger populations of people with Arab ancestry, such as the greater Detroit metropolitan area or Los Angeles.

“You have doctors who are forced to close their offices because they’re Arab, and you have attorneys who lose clients because they have Arab name,” he said. “They are forced to come back into the cities and provide services to their own.”

The ADC campaign is gathering steam as the US heads to the November election between President Trump and Democratic hopeful Joe Biden

Although no statistics exist that illustrate the business impact of discrimination against Arab-Americans, incidents of racism against the community are common, particularly against Muslim Arab-Americans.

A 2017 study from the Pew Research Center, for example, found that 75 percent of American Muslims believe there is “a lot” of discrimination against them, with 60 percent saying that media coverage of Muslims in the US is unfair.

The study also found that 32 percent reported coming ‘under suspicion’ in 2017 – the year Trump came into office – compared to 28 percent the year prior.

At the moment, there is no official estimate as to the number of Arab-Americans, as they are not specified as a separate ethnic group in the census. The ADC estimates that there are between four and seven million Americans with Arab origins.

Five things we learned:

1. Arab-American businesses face discrimination from potential clients and customers
2. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee has called on both presidential candidates to take steps to address this discrimination
3. While Biden has vowed to look into the matter, the Trump administration has yet to respond
4. Discrimination has forced many Arab businesses to concentrate in Arab-American hubs
5. Other minority groups have received assistance from the Department of Commerce