Why The Middle East’s Largest Christian Community Is Fleeing Egypt

Incense smoke fills the air as a priest with a salt-and-pepper beard and a billowing white gown recites Arabic hymns at the pulpit. Rows of red-cushioned wooden pews gradually fill, and a group of mostly young women carrying their children squeeze themselves into a standing space in the back.

Aging Egyptian men with scruffy chins meet outside by the parking lot, speaking Arabic. In the lobby, latecomers for a simultaneous English prayer service upstairs, many of them second-generation Egyptian-Americans, make way for the staircase, dodging little boys chasing one another in unpredictable directions. It's a Sunday morning at the Coptic Orthodox Church of Saint Mark in Jersey City, New Jersey, and the faithful have gathered to pray.

Egyptian churches across New York and New Jersey have seen their communities swell in recent years as Egypt has faced political turmoil, a slumping economy and a growing militant insurgency. The exodus has intensified fears for the future for Christianity in the Middle East, as some now worry for the fate of Egypt’s Christians, one of the world’s oldest Christian communities.

“Mostly they’re coming to find better opportunities because of uncertainties in Egypt,” said Rev. Markos Ayoub, a priest who leads the Sunday liturgy at St. Mark in English. “It’s not easy to be a Coptic Christian in the Middle East these days.”

Asylum statistics from 2013, the most recent year for which government statistics are available, show that the number of asylum claims granted to Egyptians in the U.S. climbed almost 10 times from their 2010 level to 3,102 in 2013. Only Chinese asylum seekers accounted for a greater number of granted claims, and although the statistics do not separate asylum claims based on religion, several immigration lawyers said Copts accounted for a vast majority of their Egyptian clients. Those numbers do not account for people who came on other types of visas. The New York City region is home to one of the nation's largest Egyptian enclaves.