Hany Mostafa and Mustafa AbuSaab say it is welcome news that the Biden administration has announced plans to change the government’s collection of information on race and ethnicity.

The U.S. Census Bureau plans to add a category for people of Middle Eastern or North African descent, a change that advocacy groups have long called for.

It’s about representation, say the two Long Islanders.

“Since I came to this country, I feel that the Middle Eastern group in particular is not adequately represented,” Mostafa, 49, said, referring to government forms. He said he has lived in the U.S. for 26 years and came from Egypt to pursue a master’s degree in finance at Sacramento State University in California. The certified public accountant, who lives in Westbury, started his own firm.

Mostafa said the choices available to him on census forms and other documents, such as his children’s college application forms, did not accurately reflect his or his family’s racial or cultural identity. “There’s really no way to indicate that group or ethnicity.”

Politicians at the federal level and in New York state have taken note and set in motion plans for a separate Middle Eastern or North African demographic category, commonly referred to as MENA, on census forms and other government documents. At the federal level, however, those plans may depend on the outcome of the election, as the previous Trump administration rejected the proposal.

Proponents say that a category for MENA people will improve the accuracy of population statistics and help policymakers more accurately identify the potential needs of this community and any inequalities it may face.

Collecting such data also provides important information to policymakers, officials said. The U.S. Census Bureau said in an April report that advocates for Middle Eastern or North African peoples “have strongly advocated for a MENA category and the need for demographic and socioeconomic statistics on their populations to support policy decisions, health research, civil rights monitoring and enforcement, and many other needs.”

Taina Wagnac, senior manager for state and local policy at the New York Immigration Coalition, said, “The revision of the OMB (Office of Management and Budget) standards came after years of advocacy.”

She supported another key change in revisions approved by the OMB earlier this year to combine questions on race and ethnicity, which are currently asked separately on census forms but which census officials and others say is confusing for many Latino respondents, since many of them end up checking the “some other race” box on the census.

AbuSaab, 45, of Syosset, owns a convenience store and noted that he is actually instructed to check “white” on the census forms.

Question 9 of the 2020 census asks, ‘What is your race?’ and includes the following prompts for the ‘White’ category: ‘White – in print, e.g. German, Irish, English, Italian, Lebanese, Egyptian, etc.’, with an arrow pointing to a box below for any other nationality the respondent may wish to indicate.

“My skin color is white,” AbuSaab said, but added, “That’s not my race” nor does it reflect his background. He added he didn’t know about this planned change in the federal government’s data collection until Newsday asked him about it, but said the issue “means something to me.”

“I was born and raised in Syosset,” said AbuSaab, the child of Palestinian parents. “My entire life as an American taxpayer, I have read the names ‘White,’ ‘Alaskan Native,’ ‘Eskimo,’ ‘Native American,’ and ‘Other’ on documents asking for racial information. “I feel like I’m not counted every time I fill out a federal form.”

A separate MENA category, Wagnac said, would more accurately reflect the population than tabulating it in the white race category, as was done in the 2020 census. “Many people from the Middle East or North Africa did not see themselves as white, so it is not accurate or fair for them to tick ‘white’ and not be perceived as white,” she said. “They face many police checks and immigration measures that the white population does not face.”

According to the Census Bureau, in the 2020 census, which for the first time collected responses from the MENA region, 3.5 million people reported being of Middle Eastern or North African ancestry.

The Census Bureau explains that the MENA category is “geographically based and includes Arabic-speaking groups such as Egyptians and Jordanians and non-Arabic-speaking groups such as Iranians and Israelis,” as well as “ethnic and transnational groups from the region, including Assyrians and Kurds.”

But Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington DC, says adding a MENA category would simply result in a mixing of different population groups.

“It’s misguided because it’s done for political reasons,” said Gonzalez, who also criticized other racial and ethnic categories as divisive, saying, “This is a politics of divide and rule and balkanization of America.”

New York state lawmakers have also focused on collecting demographic data on Middle Eastern and North African populations, passing a law to that effect in June that states: “Any state agency, department, or commission that directly collects demographic data on the ethnic origin of residents of the State of New York shall use separate collection categories… for the white group… including the following Middle Eastern or North African groups in New York State,” naming a long list of nations and indigenous groups in the regions.

It calls for data to be published or released on or before December 1, 2025, for most departments and by July 1, 2026, for some others.

Getting information about a population whose visibility is growing but not necessarily reflected in government data was the impetus for New York’s legislation to collect demographic data on the Middle East and North Africa population, said Assemblywoman Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas (D-Queens), who introduced the measure in the Assembly. The sponsor in the state Senate was Michael Gianaris (D-Astoria). She said there are estimates that the MENA population in the state is between 300,000 and 500,000, “but it’s difficult to get that out by municipality,” she said.

“As a legislator, it’s important for me to know what the needs are in my district,” Gonzalez-Rojas said in an interview. “The first step is to get the data and make sure the state gets the information out about who lives in New York State.”

And referring to the census form that caused people from the Middle East and North Africa to select their race as white, Gonzalez-Rojas said that these people as a group “have not benefited in the slightest from the privileges of white people. On the contrary, they have been specifically targeted… Race is about social status in society, and the reality is that people in the Middle East and North Africa have very different experiences than white people.”

The congresswoman expressed hope that Governor Kathy Hochul would sign the bill “sooner rather than later.” Hochul has until December 31 to decide whether to sign the bill. A spokeswoman for Hochul said in an email that the governor is reviewing the bill.

The Census Bureau announced its proposed timeline for implementing the new changes in a July 12 notice in the Federal Register. It said it would begin collecting race and ethnicity standards in the American Community Survey in 2026 for distribution the following year, or by 2027 for distribution in 2028. The revised standards would also be applied to the next census in 2030.

Gonzalez-Rojas says they introduced the MENA category in New York because the Census Bureau needed a lot of time to revise it and it is still uncertain who will win the presidential election in November. The Obama administration considered a similar proposal in 2016, which was rejected by the Trump administration in 2017.

“We are hoping for a Harris administration, but given that the Trump administration would be hostile to these changes, we believe, first of all, that it is taking too long to wait for these changes,” Gonzalez-Rojas said.