Detroit Iraq City

The Motor City seems stuck in reverse these days:

Unburied bodies piling up in the city mortuary — it reached 70 earlier this year — is the latest and perhaps most appalling indignity to be heaped on the people of Detroit. The motor city that once boasted the highest median income and home ownership rate in the US is today in the midst of a long and agonising death spiral.

After years of gross mismanagement by the city’s leaders and the big three car manufacturers of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, who continued to make vehicles that Americans no longer wanted to buy, Detroit today has an unemployment rate of 28 per cent, higher even than the worst years of the Great Depression.

The murder rate is soaring. The school system is in receivership. The city treasury is $300 million (£182m) short of the funds needed to provide the most basic services such as rubbish collection. In its postwar heyday, when Detroit helped the US to dominate the world’s car market, it had 1.85 million people. Today, just over 900,000 remain. It was once America’s fourth-largest city. Today, it ranks eleventh, and will continue to fall.

Then again, maybe not...

The U.S. government resettled Mazen Alsaqa in Massachusetts in February. Within a month, the Iraqi refugee moved to Michigan.

It wasn't that Alsaqa disliked Worcester, Mass. But he never thought twice about staying. Even though the U.S. government tried to keep him away from the Detroit area and its soaring unemployment, that was the only place Alsaqa wanted to live.

Tens of thousands have fled Michigan's troubled economy in recent years, yet Iraqi refugees continue to move there despite a U.S. government policy trying to limit refugee resettlement in the Detroit area. Family ties and cultural support from the region's large Middle Eastern community appear no match for the U.S. effort, which tries to place refugees in cities where they stand a better chance of financial success...

Kabobs are easier to come by than Big Macs in some areas of the Detroit suburb of Dearborn that more closely resemble a Middle Eastern city than a Midwestern one. Arabic signs are common on storefronts, headscarves are worn by many women and at some fast food joints in the city, the meat is halal — meaning it is prepared according to Islamic law.

It's a safe bet Islamic law won't be confined to cuisine for long. D.C. seems to have two primary objectives: changing governments abroad, and changing foundational values at home by abetting a massive demographic shift. The colonization continues...