Racism and ethnic discrimination in the United States has been a major issue since the colonial era and the slave era. Legally or socially sanctioned privileges and rights were given to White Americans that were not granted to Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latin Americans. European Americans (particularly Anglo Americans) were granted exclusive privileges in matters of education, immigration, voting rights, citizenship, land acquisition, and criminal procedure over periods of time extending from the 17th century to the 1960s. However, non-Protestant immigrants from Europe; particularly Irish people, Poles and Italians, suffered xenophobic exclusion and other forms of ethnicity-based discrimination in American society, and were not considered fully white. In addition, although Middle Eastern Americans are counted as White under the US Census, Jews (including immigrants from the Diaspora and from Israel itself) and Arabs have faced continuous discrimination in the United States, and as a result, some people belonging to these groups do not identify as white. East and South Asians have similarly faced racism in America.