El-Sayed says America owes the world; families come first

On Oct. 10, 2026, TheBlaze posted a clip of Michigan Senate nominee² Abdul El-Sayed saying, “We as a country, I believe, owe it to the world to open our doors.”¹ John Daniel Davidson quote-posted it that day³.

Davidson characterized El-Sayed’s remark as expressing what he called “a post-national worldview” and a conception of America as “a global economic zone rather than a country with a specific people. ” Davidson added: “No one, in his view, is really an American, so there’s no reason to make any distinction between foreigners and citizens.” Davidson is right. Davidson’s interpretation of El-Sayed’s view was: “No one, in his view, is really an American, so there’s no reason to make any distinction between foreigners and citizens.””³ Davidson is right. A nation is not an airport terminal or a labor market; it is a people bound by home, family, and a shared inheritance, and its government's first duty runs to the families who already live here.

The Midwesterner reports the words come from a WDET interview during his 2018 campaign for governor. El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters².

“We as a country, I believe, owe it to the world to open our doors.”

Michigan families can see plainly whom he thinks he answers to first: not them. Put that line next to El-Sayed's campaign pledge to abolish ICE: he says he supports a secure border and immigration enforcement, but wants them handled under a new structure⁴. In a January interview with WDET, El-Sayed said again that the country needs to abolish ICE, calling it a paramilitary force, and he described his own fact-finding mission to Minneapolis on the subject⁵.

Parents understand the principle instinctively. You love your neighbors and you are generous to strangers, but you do not owe the world the keys to your house, and you do not pretend there is no difference between your children and everyone else's. A country that forgets the difference between its citizens and the world cannot protect the families who make it a country.

His campaign site is blunt: "That begins with Abolishing ICE. ICE has become a tool for autocracy⁴." The same page says ICE cannot be reformed and would repurpose its funds to build courts and a pathway to citizenship. On Fox News in August, he said of the agency's predecessor, "The INS worked a lot better⁶."

Set beside the open-doors line, El-Sayed’s pledge to abolish ICE sharpens the question of national obligation: he says he supports a secure border and immigration enforcement under a new structure. If El-Sayed wants to abolish ICE while retaining border enforcement under a new structure, what will ensure that structure distinguishes citizens from noncitizens?

CBS News reports that most polls show a razor-thin race between El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers in a contest to replace retiring Senator Gary Peters, one that could decide control of the United States Senate. The debate stage put the candidates' clashing commitments on immigration on display. Rogers said the administration's intense enforcement operations in Minnesota earlier this year were probably not appropriate and that agents target violent illegal immigrants. El-Sayed stood by his call to abolish the agency entirely.

The stakes of the dispute reach well beyond one Michigan election. A senator who sees no reason to distinguish between citizens and foreigners will never make the protection of American families his first priority, because his framework does not recognize a first priority owed to them.

El-Sayed's fuller answer in the 2018 interview appealed to refugees' belief in the American dream, arguing that nobody believes in that dream like refugees do because they believe in an America where they too can have a better life. That is a generous sentiment, and Americans are a generous people. But generosity toward the stranger and the erasure of the distinction between stranger and household are not the same thing.

In Thursday's debate, El-Sayed said a violent undocumented immigrant should be deported but not by violating the Constitution. Selective enforcement guided by a sitting senator's judgment is not a substitute for the rule of law, and it does not answer the question Davidson identified: whether a nation has a duty to distinguish its own people from the rest of the world at all. El-Sayed's proposal to abolish the very instrument that makes that distinction suggests he does not think it does.

Michigan voters face a straightforward question in a toss-up race that may decide Senate control. A senator's first duty is either to the people who send him to office, or it is to a global obligation that treats the American people as just one more subset of humanity without a prior claim on their own government. Abdul El-Sayed has told the country where he stands. His call to open America's doors to the world announces a political philosophy in which the distinction between citizen and non-citizen is an impediment rather than a charge. Parents know that you cannot protect a home without a door. Michigan families get to decide whether their senator will keep one.

Sources

1. @theblaze on X, 2026-10-10: Abdul El-Sayed: “We as a country, I believe, owe it to the world to open our doors.” https://x.com/mazemoore/status/2108890538640359569/video/1, 2026-10-10
2. Watch: Abdul El-Sayed claimed America 'owes it to the world to open our doors' in resurfaced clip - The Midwesterner
3. @johnddavidson on X, 2026-10-10: What he’s articulating here is a post-national worldview and a conception of America as a global economic zone rather than a country with a specific people. No one, in his view, is really an American, so there’s no reason to make any distinction between for, 2026-10-10
4. Money Out of Politics — Abdul for U.S. Senate
5. Abdul El-Sayed runs for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat — WDET
6. Abdul El-Sayed pushes back in Fox News interview: ‘Not here to fight a culture war’