Iraqi Americans
[4] The United States expedited the process in accepting Iraqi refugees since October 2007, but did not achieve its target of 12,000 such people for fiscal year 2008 as of February 2008.
[5] Congress and other non-governmental organizations have criticized the US Administration for dealing with the pending issue of Iraqi refugees in such a slow manner, particularly those whose life is threatened for cooperating with US Forces.
[8] Chicago's first Assyrians, primarily Christian, arrived around the turn of the twentieth century and settled along the northern lakefront, establishing a community church in Lincoln Park.
The new arrivals have sought residence along the lakefront in Uptown, Edgewater, Rogers Park, and nearby neighborhoods, while a growing number have moved to northern suburbs.
Highly educated Muslims, these Arab migrants have entered a range of professional occupations and settled largely in Northbrook and nearby suburbs.
Many of these new arrivals were prisoners of war who were flown to the United States from Saudi Arabia, and a large portion were Muslim Shi‘a who had staged a failed uprising against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and feared reprisal.
Over 20,000 Iraqi Americans reside in California (many tens of thousands live in San Diego and Los Angeles areas) but with the most concentrated in the communities of Modesto, Ceres and Turlock in Stanislaus County in Central Valley, mainly are descendants of agricultural laborers invited to work in the US in the 1920s.
[16] The eruption of World War II in 1939, resulted in more than seventy Babylonian Jewish families immigrating to the United States from Iraq.
[16] It is estimated that the total Iraqi Jewish population in the US exceeds 15,000 people, with large concentrations in California, New York, Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts and New Jersey.
Smaller known groups of Iraqi Jews, can also be found in Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas, as well as other States.
[16] The members of the community are driven by ambition to succeed in businesses and as professionals, and this urge has been taking precedence over most other aims in life apart from family cohesion and religious observance during the High Holidays.
In the early 1990s, a magazine called The Periodical Publication of Congregation Bene Naharayim was published in New York and it reaffirmed the pride of the Iraqi Jews in their ancient heritage, by linking it directly to the glorious traditions of the Babylonian Jewry.
