The near East in Flint, Michigan

HE adaptation of small immigrant groups in American cities to their new environment meets with a varying degree of success. Many factors are involved: the previous occupations of the immigrants, the economic structure of the city in which they have made their new home, the relationship of the time of settlement to occupational opportunities, and the attitudes of the immigrants themselves. Illustrations of the divergence in the adjustment of immigrants to a new economy are furnished by two small groups from the Near East that have settled in Flint, Michigan: the so-called and the Druses. Flint has been largely a one-industry town. Its growth has corresponded closely with the increase in the production of automobiles in its plants. From i86o to I900 its population increased from 2950 to I3,IO3; three years later, automobile production began in Flint, and by I940 the population was I5I,543. The increase has been due mainly to migration from rural Michigan, along with that of considerable numbers of Southern whites, largely from Missouri and Arkansas, and of Negroes from the deep South. In I930 there were only I3,000 residents who had been born in Europe and a few hundred born in Asia. There are in Flint no large, well integrated foreign-speaking colonies like those in Detroit. This fact is important in the study of groups such as the Assyrians and the Druses. Their adjustment in Flint had to be made not within groups but in a community made up very largely of native-born Americans. Although not a large city, Flint shows an unusually wide range of socialeconomic classes. Within its limits are the homes of millionaire executives of the General Motors Corporation and the tar-paper shacks of the chronically dependent. Members of an immigrant group settling in the city usually enter the economic structure as production workers in the factories, from which position they may rise or sink in the social-economic scale. In the case of the two groups studied in this paper, the economic success of the Druses has caused them to be considered only a little lower than the oldest and wealthiest families of the city, whereas the economic dependence of the

Ancient history · Geography · History · Names, Identity, and Discrimination Research

• The Druze in North America

  Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Jane Idleman Smith•Institute of Muslim Minority…•1992

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