Among American Muslims, Donald Trump Win Has ‘Psychological Impact’

DEARBORN, MI — For many southeast Michigan residents, waking up in America on Wednesday felt a little like visiting a close but sometimes difficult friend and having the door rudely slammed in your face, leaving you standing in stunned silence at the doorstep.

Michigan is the top state, and southeast Michigan a top destination, for resettlement of Syrian refugees — a group who could be shut out of America under president-elect Donald J. Trump’s “extreme vetting” proposals — in large part because immigrants like them have been making the state their home for generations since Henry Ford introduced the $5 workday in 1914 and fueled an immigration surge.

As a result, about 40 percent of the population of Ford Motor Co.’s home base of Dearborn are Arab-Americans whose Muslim culture is pronounced in the city’s restaurants, shops and mosques. Christianity and Judaism are also major religions in the region, but for the most part, people of different faiths have peacefully coexisted.

In Arab nations around the world, Trump’s pending presidency was met with indifference and rejection. But among southeast Michigan Muslims, the hard-line policies on refugee resettlement and immigration that sparked anxiety throughout the campaign have become a real threat.

There’s no question that Trump’s now successful campaign stoked fears of exclusion among some American Muslims. A Dearborn Heights Muslim woman voting Tuesday told Patch she’s worried about what a Trump presidency will mean, not only for people of her faith, but other minorities as well.

“Donald (Trump) has not been quiet about his views on immigration,” she said. “How is America great if you get rid of the multicultural people? Blacks, Muslims and Mexicans? There won’t be anything left.”

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Abed Ayoub, a Dearborn native who is now the national legal and policy director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, holds onto a single moment that occurred a few hours after Trump was announced as the winner.

He was standing on the street in Washington, D.C., his composure rocked by Trump’s victory, when a non-Arab gently patted his back in a gesture that symbolizes to Ayoub that more people respect the value of a diverse population than reject it.

Still, Ayoub told Patch, “the psychological impact is very real.”

Ayoub said his office has received a barrage of questions Wednesday from anxious Arab-American parents who worry if their children will be targeted in schools and others who don’t feel as safe as they did last week. As president, Trump needs to calm those Americans’ fears, Ayoub said.

Unless he moderates his tone and more finely hones immigration policies — which the ADC expects to be an early focus of the Trump administration — Ayoub worries that his rhetoric will lead to hate crimes and discrimination against Arab-Americans, Mexican immigrants and other minorities.

“Donald Trump did not invent hate crimes, discrimination and bigotry,” Ayoub said, “but he provided a space for it to be normal.”

The rise of ISIS terror around the world and the resulting flying restriction and questions at borders already had made the environment for American Muslims difficult before Trump interjected anti-Islamic rhetoric into the presidential campaign, Nasser Beydoun, chairman of the board of directors of the Dearborn-based Arab-American Civil Rights League, told Patch.

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“He has been the poster boy for Islamophobia, racism and prejudice, issues we thought had been swept under the rug until (discrimination) reared its ugly head,” Beydoun said. “He made it politically correct to be prejudiced, to hate, to vilify.”

Among Arab-Americans, “there is a pessimism and kind of ‘what happened here?’ attitude,” Beydoun said. "We have to take a wait-and-see attitude to see if the rhetoric matches the policy, but I’ll tell you, it’s going to be a tough four years.”

Beydoun said he and other Arab-Americans are “in shock” over Trump’s victory. He went to bed Tuesday before the race had been called. He expected to wake up Wednesday morning to Trump’s defeat and soul searching by Republican Party officials on how to expand the base to include diverse communities.

“Trump knew what to say and how to energize his base, and he proved everybody wrong,” Beydoun said. “The formula seems to work.”

That, for many Americans, makes Trump’s presidency a threat to years of civil rights advances.

“The election results obviously do raise a lot of concerns within the community, and that’s directly related to the rhetoric in campaign — and not just Arab-Americans and Muslims, but also Hispanics, women, the LGBT community, the disabled,” Ayoub said. “And the list goes on.”

In his televised speech after Democrat Hillary Clinton conceded the race early Wednesday morning, Trump sounded more measured, humble and interested in uniting the country than he had during the raucous campaign rallies that charted his meteoric rise the presidency, Ayoub pointed out.

“Words have weight,” Ayoub said. “If he wants to bring this country together, he needs to move away from the hateful rhetoric and be careful of the tone used in discussions about immigration reform, which we think is going to be a core issue that will be addressed quickly by the Trump administration.

“Immigrants built this country and added immensely to the history, culture and the mosaic of what this country is,” he added. “As he begins working on this issue, we hope he takes the road of inclusiveness and doesn’t target any specific communities.”

Ayoub said the ADC and similar groups want to assist Trump in the development of immigration and refugee resettlement.

“We hope he includes members of the immigrant community that he has offended and advocacy groups that can provide insight,” he said. “We need to push for these issues to be inclusive for all Americans.”

Photo by Andrew E. Larsen via Flickr Commons