The traditional clothing of the first Syrian immigrants in the United States, along with their occupation as peddlers, led to some xenophobia.[25] Scholars such as Oswaldo Truzzi have speculated that this work ultimately helped Syrian integration into the US by accelerating cultural contact and English language skills.[26] It has been estimated that nearly 80% of first generation Syrian women worked as street merchants.[27] They and their children were often negatively stigmatized as "street Arabs" or inaccurately assumed to be unmarried mothers or prostitutes.[25] In 1907, Congressman John L. Burnett called Syrians “the most undesirable of the undesirable peoples of Asia Minor”[4]:306 and such stigmas appear again in a 1929 survey in Boston that associated Syrians with "lying and deception."[28][15]:306