Good afternoon. My name is Sam Gomez. I'm the Director of Diversity and Inclusion for the City of New York. And I would like to welcome everyone to our first annual Arab American Heritage Month recognition. Our Director of Diversity, I quote an inclusion for the City of New York. It's been my goal to be able to celebrate and recognize all the different cultures that live in this city. Our city is very diverse and very unique and so many different cultures live here and it is important for me and for the city to recognize them. So I am happy to be able to be here today. And now I would like to introduce you to Mayor Gedewe Ramo's Herbert. Good evening. As Sam noted, it is an honor to kick off our inaugural Arab American Heritage Month. I've my voices strained today, I apologize. A time to celebrate the profound contributions of Arab Americans to our nation and right here in our city. The Arab American community embodies the values that make our country strong. Faith, family, hard work, and service. These are the very principles that have built New Rochelle into the vibrant diversity that we are proud to call home. Tonight we honor that legacy and we celebrate the rich tapestry of cultures that strengthen our city and remind us that the American Dream is alive and well here in New Rochelle. And I know that our team will find a way to have this stand out in our building, but I'm really proud to offer proclamation for claiming the month of April as Arab American Heritage Month in the city of New Rochelle, urging all of our residents to join in honoring the contributions of Arab Americans and celebrating our rich cultural heritage. Thank you, Mayor. And now we're letting to do our city money with Fred Amalandas. Thank you. This is really an honor to be part of the first Arab American Heritage Celebration for the City of New Shell. I want to thank Sammy and the team for putting this together. It's always a lot of work. And thank you for coming out today. Just as the mayor said, it's just another representation of the diversity and what the Arab American Heritage really contributes to the City of New Rochelle. And to basically all of America and all of our fabric, really the good social values, the family, the food, the cuisine, I love it all. And it's really rich and it's really inspiring to know that they're part of this community also. So thank you and enjoy. Okay so very very good one second we're going to put a video on. It's a video that I've been looking for something that explains to everyone what it is to be part of the American community and I think this video will be great for everyone to know what the African, the African American experience is in the U.S. So let me put it up and then we'll watch it for a few minutes. Performance. former Paula Abduel, former NFL quarterback, Doug. The Hello and welcome to Comcast Newsmakers. I'm Tatiana Anderson. The four folks just mentioned, among many other high-profile people across many professions, are Arab American. And while the U.S. Census data from 2017 estimates that Arab American population to be just over 2 million people, the Arab American Institute says that that number is much higher. And joining me to talk about that is Dr. Jane Zogby. Dr. Zogby, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Let me just, a comment on the numbers. You said the Arab Americanist, who says there's more and the reason why we do is because that number 2.1 or 2 million is exactly equal to the number of people from Arab countries that have come as immigrants in the last 120 years. We know that they actually had children, and while there's a death rate, there's also a birth rate that exceeds the death rate. So we estimate the number is approximately double what the census has from the studies that we've done by community. So Dr. Zagbi, just because Arab Americans have it in common, the fact that they are Arab, but there are still a lot of distinctions within that. Dive into a little bit of that for us. Well, look, we're talking about 22 countries. We're talking about people of different religions and backgrounds. And we're talking about generational differences, those who came before World War I. There was a period of about 20 years in between the two wars where immigration zeroed out for people of Arab descent. And then after, there were multiple waves. And so each of those generations are also different. But what's interesting is that while they come with the differences, those differences seem to meld into a community over time. You know, we talk a lot about marginalized groups and in a sense Arab Americans are marginalized. I mean, we saw the reaction after 9-11. We saw something called a Muslim ban happen here in the United States. But when it comes to socioeconomics and education, Arab Americans are pretty much the opposite of marginalized. Talk to us about the place of Arab Americans in that context in the United States. They're doing quite well. We are doing quite well. According to the census data, our income levels are higher than the average and our education levels are much higher than the average. A lot of Arab immigrants come here educated to be precise, but then there are those who don't. And I always tell the story of the Yemeni community. I remember when I first opened an office in California to deal with defamation and media somebody said you really need to have Something for the farm workers and I said farm workers and they said yeah, this is 1981 they said there were 7,000 Yemeni farm workers in Comparison with the 33,000 Mexican American farm workers So it was a pretty pretty large group, they were the second largest, but there were no Arabic speakers in the agricultural labor relations board in Sacramento. And the unions weren't organizing them. So I went out there and I realized that there was a problem. We opened an office to provide them with healthcare services, translation, help them with their taxes and and so on. About 10 years later, Jesse Jackson called me and he said, Dolores, where the Farm Workers Union wants you to talk to the Arab grocers, there were so many in every city, to help restart the Great Boycott. I said, I'll make a deal. If she organizes the Yemeni Farm workers, I'll do that for her. And so he got back to me a couple of days later and he said, Dolores said, there's no Yemeni farm workers left. It may be about 400 doing specialty pruning. I said, where are they? And turned out that they'd left the fields for small business. And today, one of the fastest growing groups that we have in the community is a Yemeni young professional association, Yemenis, who, the kids of that generation, who are engineers and doctors and lawyers and the like. And that is pretty much the story of most of the waves. My father was a grocer. So many Lebanese immigrants in Syrian and Palestinian and Egyptians are grocers and then their kids end up going to graduate school. It's a great story. So, Dr. Zagbi, Arab Americans aren't struggling compared to other groups when it comes to things like socioeconomics and education, but every group has their challenges. What are some of the things that Arab Americans are dealing with these days? I think that from the beginning, our experience has been the problem of political exclusion. Because so many Arab Americans feel strongly, for example, about the Palestinian issue. There's been a problem of excluding us from politics. Candidates rejecting endorsement, giving money back. And then the recent immigrants always face a backlash. We've dealt rather effectively, I think, with both. We've mainstreamed our politics, going back to the Jesse Jackson campaign, which I was a deputy campaign manager of an 84. We've empowered Arab Americans and today, a city like Dearborn, who's mayor in 85, ran on the platform, what to do about the Arab problem. Today, we have three Arab Americans running for mayor and Dearborn and a majority of the city council is Arab American. So we've overcome exclusion. We've overcome the politics of sort of trying to write us off because we favored a non-popular issue. A majority of Americans agree with us today. And I think we've done pretty well, but there's always the problem of being foreign that plagues new immigrants and immigrant communities that are not mainstream and we still are working to get there. But we're making headway. I look where we were, I see where we are and the progress is really extraordinary. We feel good about it. It's a great American story. It is a great American story and I know our viewers are going to want to know more. So when they do, what's your website? Where can they go? They can go to it's aaiusa.org. Aaiusa.org and on Twitter, it's at aaiusa. Dr. James Zogby of the Arab American Institute. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. And thanks to our viewers as well for watching. As always, for more great conversations with leaders in your own community and across the country, log on to comcastnewsmakers.com. I'm Tatiana Anderson. So thank you. I saw the video represented well while the Arab American experience was. So I wanted to be able to share that with you. As I grow in this job, I'm able to learn a lot more about different cultures. So it is a privilege to be able to share some of that knowledge where everybody here. So before we end, every time we have a celebration, we like to take a picture. So we would like to invite everybody to join us in Council Chambers for a group chat. So please, everyone come with us, take a picture. We would love to have everyone join us in our first recognition picture. Thank you all. Thank you all. Thank you.