The average American’s conception of immigration, largely informed by the mythology of Ellis Island, tends to look something like this: the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free come to the states not only looking for a better life, but looking to transform — to become American. This is the story of our grandparents, and our great-grandparents. This is the story of my own grandmother, in fact, who moved here as a little girl from Spain during the Spanish Civil War. She was the most unforgiving champion of America I ever knew, ferociously criticizing, in her thick accent, every self-hating American she met. But immigration in the 21st Century, while similar in places, is notably different in general.

Today, while the American government no longer guards its own border, demanding legal entry, the American people no longer expect assimilation. The results are increasingly a nation divided, as enormous populations of immigrants make no effort whatsoever to adopt our national values, in some cases including the very value of “freedom” that is etched into the Statue of Liberty and endlessly quoted at skeptics of our current, effectively-open border. Ironically, proponents of the very policies that have driven us here are, in a little Michigan town up north, some of the earliest victims.

A great, frustrating, important story from River Page.

-Solana

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In 1909, up-and-coming automakers John and Horace Dodge came to the tiny German farming village of Hamtramck, Michigan. The brothers had a factory in nearby Detroit, but it was too small. They purchased a plot of land on the south side of Hamtramck and started building a giant plant known simply as “Dodge Main.” Within a few years, the local German-American farmers were vastly outnumbered by the Polish immigrants who came to work at the plant. By 1930, 83% of the city was Polish, and by 1970, 90% was. Then, in 1980, the plant closed, turning the once prosperous suburb into one of the poorest towns in America overnight. Nearby, Bengali supervisors at other factories hired their own, which attracted immigrants from Bangladesh. Other Muslim immigrants followed, many of them refugees from Yemen and Bosnia, among parts of the Muslim world. Attracted by the low cost of living, immigrants from other countries came too, as did black Americans from Detroit. By 2021, only 8% of Hamtramck residents claimed Polish descent. 

That year, the town made headlines after becoming the first American city where every elected official was a Muslim — including the last remaining Polish (and female) city council member, a convert named Amanda Jaczkowski (she resigned in 2023, and a Muslim man was appointed in her place). The mood was celebratory. “The City Council reflects both a new religious reality and a diverse racial reality that increasingly marks our cities,” one political science professor from Brown told NBC News, calling it “a genuine breakthrough and a tale as old as time.” The talk of diversity, progress, and inevitability obscured the fact that half of Hamtramck’s population isn’t Muslim. More to the point, it obscured the fact that this development could mean something.

But it wouldn’t stay that way for long.

“We welcomed you, we created nonprofits to help feed, clothe, find housing. We did everything we could to make your transition here easier, and this is how you repay us, by stabbing us in the back?” said Catrina Stackpool, a lesbian former city council member, after her Muslim successors voted to block the display of Pride flags on city property this June. Pride month came and went, but the battle raged on in Hamtramck. In July, the council voted to remove two commissioners from the city’s Human Relations Commission for violating the new flag ordinance. Two months later, the mayor and council balked at the idea of marching in front of the Hamtramck Queer Alliance, a local LGBT organization, during the city’s annual Labor Day parade, demanding the parade planning committee place them further ahead of the group. Mayor Ghalib told local press it was “a provocative move, intentionally done by the organizing committee to make us look, in front of the community, like we are leading the queer group with the flags flying behind us.” He added: “They have become very predictable. I told some council members three days ago that I expect them to do this and, for that reason, the first thing we did was to look at the order of the marching groups and we found what we expected.” If the parade planning committee — officially called the Hamtramck Labor Day Festival Volunteer Committee — had intended to get a rise out of local officials, it probably got more than it bargained for. On Labor Day, the mayor and councilmen led the parade in an SUV, instead of walking in it as had been tradition for local officials, and threatened to ban future Labor Day celebrations in Hamtramck.

Just days later, the council made their next move. They passed a “minority intimidation law,” which sets punishments of up to 90 days in jail and fines of up to $500 for anyone found guilty of intimidating or harassing someone “because of that person's race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or national origin.” The law applies to incidents involving physical contact, damaging property, making threats, or placing an object on a vehicle. Some allege the bill was unnecessary due to a similar state law, and that it was passed in an attempt to intimidate, silence and potentially punish city council critics. Comments by the mayor and city council members tacitly confirm this. According to the Detroit Free Press:

[Mayor Ghalib] and Mayor Pro Tem Mohammed Hassan, one of six members of the council, said people who obey the law have nothing to fear from the new law, implying that people opposing the law are the ones committing acts of vandalism. Hassan said LGBTQ+ stickers have been placed on his forehead and mouth on images of him on posters.

The unusual provision criminalizing “placing objects on a vehicle” was added after someone put a sticker on the mayor's car. One could argue local activists' sticker tactics constitute vandalism and banning it does not necessarily cross the line into suppression of free speech, though it's close enough you might have to make the argument in federal court. But this isn’t just about stickers. During the contentious, four-hour public hearing about the bill, the mayor also alleged that a single flier — discovered by his predecessor Karen Majewski in a trash can — was an Islamaphobic attack on all Muslims. The implicit suggestion here — that the bill might be used to arrest someone for calling a politician a terrorist — is a blatant assault on the First Amendment.

I doubt the Christian hicks who want to take books from drag queens and burn them (or whatever) would resort to European-style hate speech laws, but the basic elements of the Hamtramck culture war could have played out in dozens of American locales over the past several years. What is different is the “sense of betrayal” felt by Hamntrack progressives. Why were they surprised by any of this?

There are two reasons. The first is that modern American progressivism is hopelessly secular in both practice and theory. This is particularly true on the elite, tastemaker level. Though they might nominally identify as Christians, Jews, or something else, hardly anyone in the left wing intelligentsia really believes in God, and they assume nobody else really does either. On one end, this leads them to conclude that Christian objections to abortion, for example, are not motivated by the belief that fetuses have souls, but rather, a covert patriarchal desire to “control women’s bodies.” Muslims, on the other hand, are a small minority with little influence on politics, so liberals can project any beliefs they want onto them, and ignore evidence to the contrary. The end result is the idea of Muslim Americans — a persecuted quasi-racial group of Ramadan-celebrators who share no concrete beliefs about the world. Even when a Muslim joins ISIS, the sincerity of his religious convictions are still doubted. Instead of blowing himself up for God, it’s theorized he’s actually fleeing marginalization and discrimination, or seeking romance.

The second is the belief that, because Muslims are a minority, the Muslim politicians would be automatically supportive of other minorities, including LGBT people — even when they explicitly state otherwise, as the mayor of Hamtramck did when he was running for the office on an explicit campaign promise to remove pride flags. This assumption comes from what I call the “Rainbow Coalition myth.” The idea of the Rainbow Coalition, popularized by Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign, essentially assumes all minorities are congenital leftists interested in fighting “inequality” and “oppression” in all its forms, not just the ones which affect them directly. The idea that the beliefs or interests of one group might conflict with or contradict those of another was never addressed. Jackson’s campaign failed, but the Rainbow Coalition myth grew, incorporating new minorities who invented themselves online, and old academic concepts like intersectionality. The end result is the black peg-legged polyamorous hijabi — a character created by an Instagram activist to explain the puzzling concept of “solo-polyamory.”

Drawn in the “Corporate Memphis” style — an aesthetic abomination centering cartoony elephantiasis patients that was thrust upon the public by Big Tech in the 2010s — the character is both a personification of the Rainbow Coalition myth’s final form and an unintentional satire of it. It suggests that being a devout Muslim doesn’t preclude someone from adopting a niche neo-queer identity any more than being a peg-leg does. Indeed, the essence of the Rainbow Coalition myth is that to be a Muslim is really no different than being a peg-leg, because minorities are defined by their marginality alone. To be a minority is to suffer oppression and injustice at the hands of the majority.

This concept emanates from the historical experiences of black Americans, where it makes sense. After all — “Whites Only” signs applied to all black people equally, regardless of their religion, class, or culture, to say nothing of their individual beliefs or character — so one could argue that, at least historically, to be a black American was to face oppression, more than anything else. The same can’t be true of virtually any other minority in America, and particularly not Muslims. Islam is not congenital, like race, disability, or sexual orientation. It’s a religion, a set of beliefs which people choose to adhere to. But within the cosmology of the Rainbow Coalition myth, Muslims are not defined as practitioners of a religion, but rather as victims of post-9/11 bigotry: To be a Muslim is to experience Islamophobia, or to pretend you have as in the case of Hasan Minhaj.

But as we clearly see in Hamtramck, Muslims are not always progressive, nor victims, nor minorities. One could argue the massive influx of Muslim immigrants into Hamtramck is really no different than the previous Polish influx, and they will assimilate in a similar fashion. After all, weren’t most of the queer activists descended from devout Catholic Poles? Perhaps. But one can follow Catholic teaching down to the finest point and still be a fully assimilated American. For other religious groups, history has given us mixed results. From colonial-era German Anabaptists, we got the gay-marriage-supporting Mennonite Church USA and the old order Amish. From the Ashkenazi Jews we got Jerry Seinfeld and the Hasids. From the Mormons we got suburban Avon ladies and prairie-dress-wearing polygamists.

Can we assimilate Hasan Minhaj into American culture? We already have. Can we assimilate women who believe it is a sin to show the lower halves of their face in public? No. Her children? Probably not most of them, not in a Muslim majority town. Her grandchildren? Maybe half.

We can assimilate some Muslims, and in no doubt within a few decades some of the nagging queer activists will be Bengalis. But there will also still be 3rd generation Yemeni women walking around dressed like bee keepers, for progressive reasons that have nothing to do with religion, I’m sure the left will inform us. All things equal, by that time Hamtramck will be a community divided again. This time, between screaming Bengali gender goblins and women who’ve never showed their chins in a grocery store. The former is assimilated and it's hard to argue the latter is.