Coming to America.

1. Before 1965A hundred or two people.

   In the late 1950s, by the one estimate that exists, somewhere between one and two hundred Egyptians lived in the United States, almost all of them Coptic. The entire American Coptic community would have fit in a large room. Most were graduate students and physicians on training visas, and most intended to go home. The American quota system, in force since the 1920s, was built to keep people from Africa, Asia and the Middle East out.

2. 1952–1961The propertied class is ruined.

   Agrarian reform capped landholdings in 1952 and halved the cap in 1961. Coptic religious endowments were seized in 1957. The socialist decrees of July 1961 nationalized every private bank and insurance company, fifty shipping companies, and heavy industry. Between 1952 and 1966 some £E7 billion in assets passed to the state and incomes above £E5,000 were taxed at ninety percent.

   The Coptic commercial and landowning elite was destroyed by this. Its poorer coreligionists were not — Minority Rights Group notes that land reform and nationalization initially benefited middle- and lower-class Copts. Both things are true, and an account that mentions only the first is not the honest one.

   Very few left, because Egypt would not let them. Under Nasser the state heavily restricted emigration, specifically to prevent the flight of talent and of political opponents.

3. 1965–1971America opens, and Egypt loses a war.

   The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished the national-origins quotas and replaced them with a system built on family reunification and professional skills, fully in effect by 1968. For a country whose old quota had been negligible, a ceiling of twenty thousand a year was not a restriction but a door.

   Then the defeat of June 1967. The economy that followed it made Nasser's restrictions untenable. An estimated twenty-five thousand of the 31,358 Egyptian-born residents counted in the 1970 census were Copts.

   Who left was determined by something specific, and it is the key to the whole story — see below.

4. 1971–1981The door opens from the Egyptian side.

   Sadat recognized emigration as a citizen's right in 1971 and lifted all restrictions on leaving. In the same period political Islam resurged, and the Migration Policy Institute states plainly that this "prompted emigration of large numbers of Egyptian Copts to Western countries."

   Two events, in 1972 at al-Khanka and in June 1981 at al-Zawiya al-Hamra, are identified by the historian Michael Akladios as the moments when a scattered migration began to think of itself as a diaspora. The second was a three-day firefight that began over a mosque being built on land designated for a church: seventeen dead, nine of them Copts, and a hundred and twelve injured.

5. September 1981The Pope is charged with being too Coptic.

   On 3 September the arrests began; the government admitted 1,536, and independent accounts say that covers only the first three days. On 5 September President Sadat withdrew state recognition from Pope Shenouda III and confined him to the Monastery of St. Pishoy in Wadi al-Natrun. When the charges were formally specified in 1983, one of them was "emphasizing a Coptic identity."

   On 6 October, Sadat was assassinated. Bishop Samuel — the bishop responsible for the overseas churches, the man who had spent twenty years building the institutional bridge that made Coptic parishes in America possible — was killed on the reviewing stand beside him.

   Pope Shenouda was confined from September 1981 until January 1985, the last of the September detainees to go free.

6. After 2011The only wave with hard numbers.

   Egyptians granted asylum in the United States: 1,027 in fiscal 2011, 2,876 in 2012, 3,407 in 2013. In fiscal 2013 Egypt was the second-largest source of people granted asylum in America, after China.

   The Department of Homeland Security does not record religion, so these are Egyptians, not Copts. But the years line up with Maspero in October 2011, where twenty-eight died and armored vehicles were driven into a crowd protesting a church burning; with August 2013, when Human Rights Watch documented attacks on forty-two churches, thirty-seven of them burned or damaged, and found that in the vast majority of cases neither police nor army were present; with the twenty-one men taken in Libya and killed in February 2015; and with Palm Sunday 2017, when bombings at Tanta and Alexandria killed at least forty-five.

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