As part of its ongoing series of Census Briefs, the U.S. Census Bureau released this 12-page document in December 2003 that examines the Arab population around the United States. The document begins with a description of how the Census enumerates which groups tend to identify as being of Arab ancestry, and then proceeds to discuss some of the findings from data gathered in the 2000 Census. Some of the findings include that the Arab population increased by nearly 40 percent during the 1990s and that people of Lebanese, Syrian, and Egyptian ancestry accounted for about three-fifths of the Arab population in the United States. The document also contains important information about the spatial distribution among persons of Arab ancestry, such as the finding that approximately half of the Arab population was concentrated in only five states, and that the state with the greatest proportion of Arabs was Michigan.