Abdul El-Sayed Said Assimilating To America Is Health Hazard In Academic Papers
Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, has emphasized his experience as a public health official serving the everyman, but his public health scholarship argues against American values in academic jargon.
Emily Kopp · Oct 22, 2026 · 4 min read
Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, has emphasized his experience as a public health official serving the everyman, but his public health scholarship argues against American values in academic jargon.
“The single biggest problem that I’ve tried to bend my time and energy to solving is the fact that too many people in this country don’t get the health care they need and deserve,” he said on the campaign trail on Tuesday, citing his experience as the top public health official in Detroit and Wayne County.
But El-Sayed’s academic work in public health has a more narrow focus. Several of the peer reviewed papers he has coauthored argue that when Arabs live in ethnically identical enclaves in America they have better health. El-Sayed’s papers often argued that “acculturation,” an academic term for adopting a nation’s values and ways of life, causes the health of Arabs in America to decline.
The papers suggest that white neighbors pose a health hazard.
“It’s pretty radical in the sense that it seems to be basically advocating Arab separatism and isolation by couching it in pseudoscientific terms,” Ian Kingsbury, senior director of the Center for Accountability in Medicine at Do No Harm, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The El-Sayed campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
El-Sayed argued that Arab residents living with mostly other Arabs saw fewer low weight births than Arabs living among whites by comparing Dearborn to other areas of Michigan in a 2010 paper.
“As ethnic minority persons live and work in the USA and interact with the white majority, they acculturate,” the paper reads. “In doing so, they may acquire cultural features from the majority that may” lessen protection against giving birth to low weight babies.
Echoing the same theory, El-Sayed argued in a 2008 paper that Arab mothers in Michigan did not have low weight births due to post-Sept. 11 discrimination because of social cohesion among a dense population of Arabs.