Three days after Democrats won the 2026 midterms, Michigan senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed spoke at an Arab-American gathering in Virginia. He said he was honored to become Michigan’s next senator, then described Michigan as “the capital of Arab America,” while acknowledging that the event was taking place in Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital.
El-Sayed is hardly the first person to point to the growing Arab and Muslim communities in states such as Michigan, Minnesota, and Texas. Americans have often faulted Europeans for doing too little as immigration reshaped their societies. Here, the usual response has been that the same thing could not happen in the United States because Americans have the Second Amendment.
For all the confidence people place in gun ownership, the right to bear arms has not stopped America from undergoing its own demographic changes. Conservatives, meanwhile, are watching Muslim politicians win elections and treating the Second Amendment like reassurance that they can fall back on as they lose political influence.
People talk about having a “red-pill moment,” when they realize politics is not what they thought. Mine came during Europe’s 2015 migrant crisis. Conflicts in the Middle East destabilized several countries, sending refugees toward Europe. Many Western governments initially welcomed them. But the arrivals were not, as some may have imagined, only women and children fleeing war. Nearly three-quarters of asylum-seekers were male, and 42% were men between 18 and 34. Many traveled beyond the first safe country they reached, continuing to places where they preferred to settle.
Europeans also faced the economic costs of immigration and, in some cases, tensions over integration. Islamist activists advocated separate justice systems based on Sharia law. In Britain, grooming-gang scandals brought attention to the rape and abuse of girls, as well as repeated failures by police and other officials to protect them. Public attitudes in countries including Germany and the United Kingdom shifted as some people came to see immigration not as a humanitarian response, but as a threat to their societies.
Voters increasingly concluded that large-scale immigration was not helping their countries, but many felt their politicians ignored them. Leaders accused critics of xenophobia and Islamophobia. In the grooming-gang cases, officials were accused of avoiding difficult questions about the crimes and those responsible. Some people who spoke up in defense of the girls faced punishment.
In country after country, voters tried to elect politicians who would oppose mass immigration, only to feel let down by the candidates they had supported. It began to seem as if the political system offered no way to address what they saw as an invasion.
While English girls were being abused, some American conservatives replied that this was what happened when Europeans gave up their guns, and that it could never happen in the United States because of the Second Amendment. Europeans, even when they protested mass immigration and their governments’ policies, were largely unarmed and poorly organized. That looked like precisely the kind of vulnerability the Bill of Rights was meant to prevent.
Yet the Second Amendment has done little to prevent similar demographic change in the United States. After the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush and Republican leaders warned Americans against blaming Islam. Even after terrorists killed thousands while invoking Islam, GOP leaders treated proposals to limit Muslim immigration as unacceptable.
Donald Trump restricted entry from several Muslim-majority countries during his first term. Critics called it a “Muslim ban.” The policy was popular with his supporters but opposed by much of the Republican establishment and the media. After court challenges, the administration revised it, and the Supreme Court upheld the revised version. Joe Biden revoked it in 2021. Trump brought back country-based travel restrictions in 2025 and extended them to Chad and the Republic of the Congo.
Republicans made Muslim immigration a topic during much of the 2026 midterm campaign, but no major GOP candidate made a broad ban on Muslim immigration a central promise. Few campaigned on expanding the travel restrictions to additional Muslim-majority countries, increasing deportations, or limiting naturalization.
The party also had little to say about Muslim political influence in major cities or the construction of mosques in Texas. New York City, the site of the deadliest terrorist attack in American history, carried out in the name of Islam, now has a foreign-born Muslim mayor. The Second Amendment did not change that.
I support the right to bear arms. It is central to American identity, and I would rather have the option of defending myself than not have it.
Still, conservatives have turned the Second Amendment into an excuse for political inaction. The belief that armed self-defense is always available can become a reason to avoid trying to change things through politics. Some seem to assume that if Muslims gain power through elections, they will never be voted out, while taking comfort in the idea that guns remain a final option.
The response to COVID lockdowns should give pause to anyone who assumes gun owners will resist when tested. Many closed their churches, wore masks, and stayed home. They complied, much like people in Europe.
Some will argue that excluding immigrants on religious grounds violates the First Amendment. I disagree. Becoming an American is not an inherent right, and the country can reject immigration that its citizens believe threatens their way of life.
If the United States does not act now to address Muslim immigration, the Second Amendment will not shield the country from the consequences of its political choices. Gun owners may remain at home as cities and states change through demographics and elections.
