Spend any amount of time in El Cajon and you’ll soon realize the city is a hub for Middle Eastern and North African communities, with people representing many ethnicities and nationalities.
But every 10 years, when it comes time to take the U.S. Census, people from these varied cultures have been counted as white.
“Thinking about East County, in particular, and El Cajon … there's an enormous Iraqi, Chaldean and Assyrian population that is not being accounted for correctly,” said Ryan Fan, advocacy & campaign manager at Majdal: Arab Community Center of San Diego. “There's an enormous Syrian population here that's not getting counted. There's an increasingly large Afghan population that's not getting counted as well. Among many others, right?”
In recent years, big steps have been taken to right this wrong. In 2024, the Biden administration ordered that the Census form be changed to include “Middle Eastern or North African” (MENA) as an option for a person’s race or ethnicity.
Then, in 2025, the California Legislature passed a law (AB 91) requiring that state and local agencies offer a series of categories for major MENA groups.
But advocates are now sounding alarms because the Trump administration has yet to include the category in the upcoming American Community Survey, which will be done next year ahead of the 2030 Census. At the state level, implementation is also years away.
“We're concerned about the success of the 2030 Census because it takes years of planning in doing that,” said Sammy Mansour, leader of the federal policy team for the National Network for Arab American Communities. “And if it doesn't get done accurately, you have to wait another 10 years … That's another decade of less effective and efficient government use of our tax dollars.”
Facing these realities, Fan and others are hoping that advocacy at the local level will help speed up the implementation.
In El Cajon, they’ve shown up to multiple City Council meetings asking councilmembers to pass a resolution supporting the implementation of the state and federal category requirements.
Fan said in public comment this was his fifth time speaking at a council meeting. “Every single time we were kind of met with, ‘Thank you very much for coming,’ but no follow-up,” he said.
El Cajon would not be the first local jurisdiction to express support for MENA data equity and the state law. The San Diego County Board of Supervisors in 2024 added the MENA category to county documentation. Anaheim, Bell and San Francisco passed resolutions in support of the state law.
Mansour and Fan said this data is necessary, because it helps provide insights for public health research, education, economic support and more.
“When we don't have good data on who we're serving and how we're serving them and when I say we — it could be a nonprofit, a researcher, a health clinic, a city government, (U.S.) Department of Health and Human Services … All of those are encompassed by this,” Mansour said. “When we provide services or we do studies, we want to know what the needs are … It is really hard to do that when you're invisible from the data.”
El Cajon Deputy Mayor Michelle Metschel said she is in favor of a local resolution.
“I'm certainly willing to help this group get the recognition that they need,” Metschel said. “I mean, bottom line, what does it hurt? Who is going to be hurt by it? How is it going to negatively affect other groups? I don't see how it can.”
She needs another councilmember’s support to get it on the agenda. KPBS requested interviews with the rest of the councilmembers but received no response.
