Ethnicity, Multiculturalism, and Islamophobia

Abstract

The tangled history of American immigration has long been circumfluent with the ambivalences of ethnicity, nativism, and assimilation. Since its primeval cradle, the American national portrait has been painted in sundry shades of immigrants from different arrays of the world along with a paradoxical sentiment of at times cherishing and other times damning their experiences in the American mainstream. The present study examines the mounting hues and cries raised over Arab immigration to the United States within anti-immigration animus climate of discrimination, Islamophobia and Multiculturalism. As a highly visible group in the aftermath of 9/11, islampophobic and anti-immigrant sentiments, particularly in the current President Donald Trump's tenure, have relentlessly made scapegoats of Arab immigrants for a myriad of social ills that ail the American national unity and hegemony. They have borne the brunt of the most hostile assaults on the grounds that the deep-seated Anglo-Protestant culture and American democratic values are undergoing undermining changes with threatening implications due to their immigration.