Dearborn — Another viral pile-on for this town after video surfaced from a September 9 city council meeting of Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud telling a white resident of the city he “was not welcome here.” The man had questioned the renaming of a city street after a local Arab journalist who supported Hamas and Hezbollah.
The moment caught the eyes of Metro Detroiters, but the response was fairly muted because, well, it’s part and parcel. Bizarre politicking from the city’s emergent Arabs is something most Detroiters take as a given.
Days after the fact, the story blew up when the questioner was identified as a Christian minister. Then Twitter/X took the moment global.
The perpetual rediscovery that Dearborn has a large Arab Muslim population is a tired old trope at this point. I can’t help but roll my eyes.
There’s a more complicated and sophisticated conversation to be had about Dearborn and its Arab residents, but it requires a deep dive into the very convoluted and fickle world of the Arab-American voters and what motivates them.
From the couches of online influencers who’ve never been here, the city can look like Terra Incognita. A foreign land inside a major metropolitan city. The lizard-brain reaction from viewers around the country is immediately negative. Dearborn evokes the chaos of the Middle East.
I’m sympathetic to that perspective, but peeling back the layers reveals some odd and uncomfortable realities at play.
First and foremost, we’re talking third- and fourth-generation Arab Americans here. The notion these people should be deported for lack of assimilation is completely absurd. To where does America deport a native-born Arab whose grandparents immigrated here in the 1970s?
Metro Detroiters who live and work adjacent to Dearborn have done business and developed relationships with Arab Americans in Dearborn for decades and can’t help shaking their heads at the nonsensical motives of the turbo-online. It hurts the credibility of influencers unwilling to actually conduct half-assed internet research.
The lack of knowledge about this community isn’t just an online problem.
Republicans long ago retreated from urban cities in favor of the suburbs. Within the last decade, they have begun ceding ground in suburban enclaves with city councils and school boards turning bluer.
If you’re paying close enough attention, this motif is certainly true in Dearborn as well, and the elected bodies here are in a state of tension with Democrat Machine politics. Arab-American parents in Dearborn are not keen on the gender and identity politics that move the needle for the college-educated women.
Democrat politicians and the activist class of Michigan got more than they bargained for in October 2022 when Arab-American parents in Dearborn descended on the local school board meetings upset over the placement of LGBTQ books in the school libraries and DEI vernacular inserted into the curriculum.
Teachers, administrators, and union activists within Dearborn Public Schools attempted in vain to defend their progressive agenda, but they didn’t understand what they had run up against.
The reason for the confusion was obvious to everyone. Democrats and their special interests never took the time to understand Dearborn parents and had erroneously assumed that the big tent of minorities liberals they think they speak for were down with the program.
Dearborn Arabs also violate the liberal consensus due to their lack of dependance on the government. Working in and around Dearborn for almost three decades, I’ve yet to encounter a homeless Arab American. Their culture already produces a social safety net. Large working families live together, often three generations deep.
Arab Americans in Dearborn also have a working-class hustle hardwired into their DNA. In many working-poor communities around Metro Detroit, men don’t leave for work in the morning, which leaders like Congressman John James recognize as a problem. This is not the case in Dearborn, as young, middle-aged, and even older men all head out to work each morning.
These issues and others create a political landscape for which Arab Americans do not ostensibly need Democrats as a ruling class. Nevertheless, Democrat party politics still infuses Dearborn’s managerial class, but only tentatively.
Remember that in the 2024 election Arab-American voters were nonplussed by Democrats and an “uncommitted” movement emerged as disillusionment with Democrats reached a fever pitch.
All of these should signify to Michigan Republicans that Dearborn is a political battleground they might consider fighting for in the long term, but that requires some heavy lifting and playing footsie with upsetting Christian voters. Everyone has to come to grips with the major issue that causes mass divergence between conservatives and Arab Americans: Israel and Jews.
The hard unswallowable truth is Arab Americans are pissed off about Israel, and many (not all) of them have favorable impressions of foreign groups terrorizing Israel. Domestically, Arab American make no secret of their tendency for antisemitism, which most Democrats not named John Fetterman oddly seem intentionally blind to.
American conservatives, specifically Christian conservatives, are broadly supportive of Israel and protective of Jews around the world. In a recent interview, a Christian pastor in Livonia informed me his congregation is decidedly pro-Israel and personally will not allow criticism of Israel to foment within his building. The notion of Arab-American and Christian conservatives finding common ground in Israel might be as distant as the moon.
Another problem might be the lack of American ethos demonstrated by Arab Americans writ-large. American Muslins cling to Western Democratic motifs as a defensive measure only, but as a Muslim American resident of Dearborn once told me, “We don’t really care. We’re here just to make money.”
Even white suburban liberals who frown on overt patriotism as a concept stand at attention during the national anthem. In the stands at a Dearborn Fordson football game, these minimal American traditions are really just for the visiting team.
Dearborn now and tomorrow remains a question mark for the state of Michigan. The Arab-American population is virtually uncapturable as a voter demographic. They don’t really like Democrats, and Republicans don’t really like them.
Interesting occurrences can and do happen. Dislike for the previous presidential administration created the runway for President Trump to make strategic campaign appearances in Dearborn and Dearborn Heights that ultimately won him those cities in the 2024 election, but Republicans in Michigan would rather walk on hot coals than pour money into a challenger to Dearborn-based Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib.
The right-wing influencers will keep chasing clickbait engagement with call-to-prayer viral videos, and the know-nothing reactionaries with limited impulse control will pound demands for deportation into the replies. But the facts remain: Dearborn’s Arab Americans aren’t going anywhere, they aren’t buying the liberal plan of action, and they are growing in numbers.
Jay Murray is a writer for Michigan Enjoyer and has been a Metro Detroit-based professional investigator for 22 years. Follow him on X @Stainless31.
