Middle Eastern Americans are Americans with ancestry, origins, or citizenship from the Middle East. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the term "Middle Eastern American" applies to anyone of Western Asian and North African extraction. This definition includes both indigenous Middle Eastern groups in diaspora (e.g. the Jewish diaspora, Kurdish Americans, Assyrian Americans, etc.) and current immigrants from modern-day countries of the Arab League, Iran, Israel and Turkey. Middle Eastern communities have been settling in America since at least the Dutch colonial period of New Amsterdam, when Sephardic Jews fleeing persecution in Brazil found refuge there in 1654.
