Michigan State Capitol in Lansing

By Julia Kassem

The Arab American News

Detroit is poised in a peculiar position. In 2014, it became a “welcoming city”, joining 40 other cities across the country, such as Boston, Los Angeles and Boise, in adopting the voluntary designation.

2014 was also the year Flint began to face the contamination of its water supply and Detroit experienced widespread and indiscriminate water shut offs.

These negative actions, executed by Governor Snyder, still remain highly salient in these communities.

Prior to Snyder’s welcome of refugees to Michigan in late 2015, he became notable as the first governor to call for a temporary stop on arrivals, helping ignite a nationwide conversation on refugee resettlement in light of the November 2015 Paris attacks.

“Michigan is a welcoming state and we are proud of our rich history of immigration,” Snyder said in a statement that month. “But our first priority is protecting the safety of our residents.”

Within a day, 23 other state governors followed suit, putting similar halts to refugee resettlement in their states as well.

Detroit city mayor Mike Duggan continuously galvanizes Detroit as a “welcoming city.”

“Detroit is a welcoming community and it’s welcoming refugees, whether they come from Africa or Iraq or Syria,” Duggan told the Detroit Free Press in 2015.

Duggan, a Democrat and critic of President Trump, blasted the president’s executive order on immigration, saying, “that’s not who we are as Americans.” In his statement, he payed homage to former President Obama as a president, who, despite attacks, stayed committed to the effort of fostering inclusivity in American cities.

“Welcoming” city vs “sanctuary” city

Donald Trump released an executive order within days of his inauguration, commanding stringent immigration enforcement and theatening the punishing of local governments that fail to comply to authorities with “sanctuary cities.”

Christiana Sauve of  Welcoming Michigan described the difference between a “welcoming city” and a “sanctuary city.

“People use that word in a way that aligns with their values,” she said of welcoming cities, noting that many claim the word, yet nobody owns it in particular.

A sanctuary city, Sauve said, does not bear a legal definition. To denote the difference, however, community members look at “what policy a city has to protect its residents and keep them safe.”

In a sanctuary city, which has no legal definition, the policies that the municipality agree on may vary. Some implement non-solicitation of immigrant status, while others to non-compliance with detainer requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 

Donald Trump’s Executive Order defines sanctuary cities as “jurisdictions that willfully refuse to comply” with a statue requiring communication between government agencies and ICE.

However, a “welcoming city” may or may not have policies attempt to limit cooperation with detainer requests. Rather, such cities aim to foster a sense of inclusivity among current immigrants by providing resources for businesses, services and nonprofits to alleviate some of the struggles of integration by assisting in business development or issuing government resources and documents in multiple languages.

The difference, Sauve reiterates, is in the language. A sanctuary city limits “any jurisdiction that limits communication with federal immigration enforcement.”

However, some feel as if the “welcoming city” designation only equivocates confrontation with the Trump administration over the austere executive order.

While Hamtramck is a sanctuary city, Dearborn joins Detroit in failing to have these protections for their prolific immigrant communities.

Previous policies: problematic precedents for Detroit

Detroit’s history is entrenched in immigration. The city was built by immigrants, from the Poles and the Germans in the late 19th century to those coming from Latin America, the Arab world and South Asia in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Unfortunately, the chronicles of a city bolstered by the contributions of immigrants in industry is marred by the legacies of redlining and racism. Factory work opened up in southeast Michigan in the early 20th century, attracting working class communities of color, including both Blacks and Arab immigrants. However, with scarce housing and an increasing population, working class White homeowners saw the influx of Black workers as a threat.

“In the 1920s, White Detroiters began to define their communities in terms of racial homogeneity and to make apparent to Blacks the high cost of penetrating those communities,” writes historian Thomas Sugrue in Origins of the Urban Crisis.

These costs ranged from, as Sugrue describes, “first by refusing to sell to Blacks, then…finally by establishing restrictive covenants to assure the homogeneity of neighborhoods.”

Dearborn, too, bears the burden of institutional racism. Former Mayor Orville Hubbard,  who ran on the slogan “Keep Dearborn Clean”, once said that “some people, the Syrians, are even worse than the n—–s.”

Dearborn, a city that is nearly half Arab American, with sizable populations hailing from Iraq and Yemen, houses many with visa or legal status threatened by Trump’s executive order.

Current Measures

The city of Detroit withheld water from nearly 40,000 residents on multiple occasions, while businesses faced no such measures.

Flint did not receive the generous and prompt response and state-of-emergency designation for lead-poisoned water that Fraser received as the result of a sinkhole.

The governor has also refused to fund and assist public schools or to  fund public transportation and has damaged the interests of working people by making Michigan a “right-to-work” state.

Rhetoric by Snyder or Duggan advocating the settlement of refugees and immigrants in Detroit, some say, should be evaluated critically.

“Who he is ‘welcoming’ is not across the board,” Cheryl Kearney, an urban planner and member of the Detroit Association of Planners, told The AANews. “Who he is welcoming are the tech people and those that work for Dan Gilbert.”

Kearney added that, in the past, cities easily accommodated immigrants under a few preconditions.

“Most people coming into the U.S. were either highly educated or were pulling in their money to start a business,” she said.

Police Issues

A large part of the sanctuary agreement status involves mutual trust between the local community and municipal law enforcement.

The Arab American News reported in 2014 that only 4 percent of Dearborn law enforcement officers were Arab American. In addition, Arab Americans who left the profession have reported complaints of discrimination and harassment.

In December, two Dearborn police were cleared in the killings of two unarmed, mentally ill Detroit residents shot in separate incidents in December 2015 and January 2016.

Identifying problems and solutions

Dearborn police remain widely popular in the community. A Facebook page, “Support for the Dearborn Police Department”, features a profile icon of a grey-scale American flag with a blue stripe.

“I support Dearborn PD,” reads the icon, which proliferated on the profile pictures of many Dearborn police supporters last year.

Despite the department’s successes with the communities they serve, their issues continue to reflect national problems within law enforcement.

These institutional problems are often the product of low wages and increasing demands on officers.

Donald Trump’s executive order policing sanctuary cities places far fetched demands on a profession that is already overworked, undertrained, and underpaid.

Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s (ICE) voluntary 287(g) program allows ICE to train local officers to identify and catch undocumented immigrants.

Sauve warned that Trump could potentially bolster the unjust program.

“You can’t mandate local law enforcement to take out federal law enforcement of ICE officers,” she said.

She also agreed that, in order for sanctuary cities to be effective, trust must be ensured between the community and its local police forces.

“If they don’t trust them, they’re less likely to report crime,” she said.