Making Health Disparities Visible: The MENA Category and COVID-19

Middle Eastern and West Asian Torontonians were hit harder by the COVID-19 pandemic than their white counterparts.

April marks Arab Heritage Month in Canada and National Arab American Heritage Month in the United States. As Arab communities in North America are increasingly gaining official recognition, they are also becoming more visible in official data. CMS affiliate Dr. Neda Maghbouleh illustrates how important this is for identifying health inequities experienced by Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) communities in her research on COVID-19 racial health disparities in Toronto.

Key Findings

• In Toronto, people of Middle Eastern, Arab, and West Asian descent were more likely to be infected with COVID-19 and more likely to be hospitalized for COVID-19 than white people.
• It is unknown whether there are health disparities between Middle Eastern people and white people in the United States. U.S. health institutions do not yet include the “Middle Eastern or North African” (MENA) racial category in their data collection, which makes health disparities between the populations impossible to track. Tracking health disparities is a prerequisite for addressing health inequities with targeted resources and interventions.

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Recommendations

• Canadian healthcare and public health institutions should routinely collect data on patients’ ethnic backgrounds. To make this data most useful, these institutions should coordinate with each other to adopt standardized data collection practices.
• Public health authorities in the United States should use the “Middle Eastern or North African” racial category in their data collection, similar to how many Canadian institutions do. This allows health disparities to be discovered and then addressed.
• Public health researchers and authorities should investigate potential health disparities between MENA and white populations in the United States.

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Implications for Current Events

One year ago, the United States federal government announced a long-awaited change to how data on race and ethnicity would be collected. After years of advocacy, there would finally be a “Middle Eastern or North African” (MENA) category available, distinct from the “white” category that obscured the existence of Arab, Iranian, and other MENA Americans. While some worry that this categorization may ultimately increase the marginalization of MENA Americans or deepen divisions between racial groups, it can also be very important for identifying inequities and directing resources towards MENA communities.

Research findings by Dr. Maghbouleh and her colleagues suggest that the MENA category will be important for public health purposes and for targeting health interventions. The U.S. National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities had already adopted the new categorisation by mid-2024, allowing their grant funding to go towards research on the health of MENA communities. However, the future of this Biden-era policy is uncertain under the Trump administration. Where there used to be a list of the racial groups within the scope of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities’ work–a list that included the MENA category–there is now only a “Page under revision” message. Dr. Maghbouleh recommends that the new administration stay the course in implementing the new rule on collecting data on race and ethnicity, cautioning that the reliability and usefulness of public health data depends on robust data infrastructure systems that are insulated from political uncertainty.

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About the Authors

Neda Maghbouleh is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in Race, Ethnicity, Migration, and Identity at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on immigration, racial categories, and identity. She is the author of The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (2017). In 2024, she was appointed by the Director of the U.S. Census Bureau to the 2030 Census Advisory Committee. She earned her PhD and MA from the University of California, Santa Barbara and her BA from Smith College. Before joining the University of British Columbia, she was an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto.

Nadia Almasalkhi is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She holds two BA degrees from the University of Kentucky and an MA degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Her current research studies the political integration and political transnationalism of Middle Eastern immigrants and diasporas, especially from Syria and Lebanon.

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This publication is part of the CMS Migration Insights Series. The research briefs synthesize peer-reviewed, published academic research by CMS affiliates.