Arabs in Bulgaria

Arabs in Bulgaria (Bulgarian: Араби в България, Arabic: العرب في بلغاريا‎) are the people from Arab countries, particularly Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian Territories, Iraq, and Jordan and also small groups from Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya and Sudan, who emigrated from their native nations and currently reside in Bulgaria. Most Arab Bulgarians are of Lebanese or Syrian origin, because they were the first Arabs to arrive in Bulgaria. The first Arabs came to Bulgaria in the late 1960s and early 1970s as students in Bulgarian universities. In the over forty-year history of this community, 11,400 Arabs have migrated to Bulgaria.[2] According to other data from two teams of anthropologists and sociologists, the number of Arabs in Bulgaria who are legal residents and officially have work permits was 17,000 in 2004. (the number 17,000 includes not only Arabs but also Kurds, Afghans, Berber and others.)[3] [4]

In addition, Bulgaria has people from Arab countries, who have the status of refugees (refugees of the Syrian civil war, but only 10% of them are Syrian Arabs, the other 90% of them are Syrian Kurds[5]) or illegal immigrants (Algerians of mainly Berber descent and usually mistakenly called Arabs) trying to immigrate to Western Europe.