Kulturkampf

[benji]

What's the backstory on the Detroit area becoming sharia-central? Was it a conscious decision to fill a vacuum when all the whites started moving out, or did it just happen naturally?

So essentially at the turn of the 20th Century there was a "large" (for the time) influx of a couple thousand Arabs, from mainly Lebanon and Syria (which you can tell by the local Middle Eastern restaurants), who came and got early jobs with/related to Ford. This created a base to which they had others come over, in small trickles, to the general area. It was never really that large until the 1980's when it grew a bit more due to people fleeing conflicts and they sort of settled into Dearborn and the "gap" area that was created as whites moved further out from the city.

By this time, whites were sort of on their third ring of suburbs of Detroit and the city itself was really bad. The infamous 8 Mile is of this time because there was a very visible ring of abandoned houses dating to the first ring that started at 8 Mile Road. If I dug up old satellite images you could plainly see this ring of abandoned buildings around Detroit. So whites moved even further from the city because shit sucks. The Arabs (and some other minority groups) picked up these cheap properties as the whites were fleeing more. Blacks mostly did not move out of the city, those upwardly mobile Blacks were moving with the whites. There are some exceptions to this but without knowing the area I can't really describe it, but there were/are a few small pockets of Blacks moving up economically like the Arabs did.

Once there started to be that settled area it attracted others who come over because if you want to do Islam there's few great places in the US to do it, cities like NYC or whatever are too mixed, you want a suburban lifestyle with your people too. Which basically made it the defacto Islamic capital of America. Detroit has since undergone some renovation and the Muslims/Arabs have been well positioned (geographically but also the types of businesses they own) to benefit from this as money flowed back into the city. 

There is a small similar situation in Minneapolis with their specifically Somali population that has done more or less the same thing. It's just also a Muslim enclave, but significantly smaller to the one in Michigan.