Re-reading Arab World–New World immigration history: beyond the prewar/postwar divide

Historical accounts of Arab migration to and settlement in the 'New World' are commonly structured in terms of a dominant theme of disruption or discontinuity centred on an immigration hiatus variously located during the interwar and World War II periods. The narratives are, hence, organised around a prewar/postwar dichotomy that posits distinctive and mutually exclusive migratory waves - one spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the other commencing immediately after World War II. This article presents a more nuanced, if not an alternative, reading of that immigration history as it pertains to flows from Arab World sources to Canada and Australia and, for purposes of comparison, to the USA. This (re)reading locates continuities in global structures and in micro-level migratory processes and entry regulation practices that transcend the prewar/postwar divide and that link Arab World-New World migrations across time and space.