NEW YORK – Kurdish-Americans have expressed concern that they will be categorized as “Arabs” in the next population count in 2020 and have urged the US Census Bureau to recognize Kurds as a distinct ethnicity.
Yuksel Serindag, a member of the Kurdish American Society, told Rudaw that his group had written to US census officials to complain that Kurds are “not a sub-category” under Arabs and that the two groups should be treated equally on government forms.
“My concern is that Kurds should not be classified as a sub-category under ‘Arab’ in the US or anywhere else,” Serindag, a Kurdish-American librarian, said. “This kind of subcategorization is incorrect, because Kurds are a majority in the areas where they live.
“A people of some 40 million deserves a category in its own right. Ethnically, Kurds are Indo-Europeans while Arabs are Semitic. The US Census Bureau is taking a politically incorrect approach and needs to get Kurds and experts involved in its decision-making.”
The federal US government is mulling whether to allow those of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) descent to identify as such on the next 10-year census, giving them greater political clout and access to public funding, among other things.
According to Serindag, members of the government’s census advisory committee have suggested that Kurds and other MENA minority groups would only be able to classify as sub-categories of Arab in the survey.
Michael Cook, the bureau’s spokesman, said officials are working on an answer to the Kurdish question. “We are in the process of drafting our response to the Kurdish American Society letter and we hope to have something soon,” he told Rudaw on Tuesday.
But, speaking on background, another census official said that Arabs, Kurds, Berbers, Assyrians, Chaldeans and other ethnic groups would most likely all be treated as equivalent sub-categories within the MENA region.
The US Census Bureau is set to test the new MENA classification for possible inclusion on the 2020 Census at focus group sessions in coming months and make its final decision based on feedback from affected groups.
Congress would still have to sign off on the proposal before the change could be added to the 2020 Census. Some Republican lawmakers have previously criticized the cost and intrusion of the census and have sought to eliminate the community surveys.
Tensions among Kurdish-Americans have been raised in recent months because of rows between Erbil and Baghdad and by the Islamic State (ISIS), a Sunni Muslim militia that is fighting the Peshmerga and others in a multi-front war across Iraq and Syria.
