March 28, 2024

To understand present, look to immigrant past

To the editor:

As I sat listening to an acquaintance railing on the Muslims in the Detroit area living so closely together, it became clear he was railing that they weren’t real Americans. They weren’t assimilating, i.e. disappearing into the vastness of the American population. His bottom line was they weren’t welcome here—they should go “home.”  Never mind many are refugees fleeing from war or persecution in their own countries of origin.

I pondered this while doing chores on my farm. I thought about my husband, a first generation American born to a German father who left Germany hungry, as did many of my husband’s mother’s German relatives who fled both war and hunger.

I thought of my mother’s own German heritage, remembering how the adults would leave us kids in the kitchen while they went into another room and closed the door to speak in German. This was in the decade after World War II and the stigma of being German was still strong. They knew fear.

Germans began coming to Iowa in the 1840’s. They settled in every county. By 1920 one-half of all Iowa farmers were German. Among the cities, Davenport had a very large concentration of German population. The Amana Colonies celebrate German festivals yearly, especially Oktoberfest. Now, in the U.S, the 2010 census shows there are 49.2 million Germans, the largest group by far, all over the U.S., with the greatest concentration in Maricopa County, Arizona (Phoenix metro area).

Meanwhile, Muslims first came to America as slaves in the 1500’s. Immigration of free persons followed in the 1600’s. By the early 1900’s in the Detroit area there were thousands of Muslims, mainly Arabs. These communities have continued to grow, reaching about 500,000 now.

In actuality, the Muslim immigration picture is of a much more dispersed population throughout the U.S. There are now about 1.6 million Arab Americans in the U.S. Dearborn (outside Detroit) is the only town in the US with a substantial number of Muslim immigrants. They make up about 30 percent of the population of this area.  A study of economic contributions found that Michigan Muslims owned 35,835 businesses in 2015, employing 103,062 Michiganders. Their households spent more than $5.5 billion in 2015.

My acquaintance lumps together as Muslims all of the immigrant people in the greater Detroit area, whether they are Muslim or not. But isn’t the current Detroit experience about which my acquaintance is complaining really a similar microcosm of the Iowa experience with Germans settling here? Over time we have done well; we have contributed significantly to Iowa’s economic development. Why shouldn’t we expect a similar experience with the Muslim immigrant communities, not only in Detroit, but also throughout America, even here in Iowa?

Bev Clark

Baxter