Muhith Mahmood took the oath of office on Sunday as mayor of the Michigan city of Hamtramck.

It was not an encouraging sight.

Video of the ceremony shows Mahmood repeating the words robotically in heavily accented English — and even badly mangling the last line.

The ceremony took place after a year of court fights over 37 absentee ballots that decided the election by 12 votes, as Detroit’s WXYZ-TV reported.

In a state that just elected a far-left, anti-Semitic Democrat to be the first Muslim in the United States Senate, the Hamtramck video is just another example of how far Michigan has fallen — the ceremony marks the visible result of decades of high immigration that has produced concentrated foreign-born populations with little interest in assimilating with traditional American culture.

Hamtramck, a small city inside Detroit with an entirely Muslim city council, is dominated by Bangladeshi and Yemeni immigrants, as WXYZ-TV previously reported. Mahmood is a Bangladeshi-American.

The outgoing mayor, Adam Alharbi, is Yemeni-American. The contest was largely an intra-immigrant affair settled by which community’s votes were ultimately tallied. And the message was disturbing:

That ethnic loyalty is what really matters in an American election.

Of course, ethnic groups in the United States have long chosen their politicians from within their ranks, but previous waves of immigrants did so while assimilating into the broader culture of the country, not while insulating themselves from it.

And that appears to be what’s happening now in places like Hamtramck.

The pattern is not unique to Michigan, similar concentrations in parts of Minnesota and elsewhere have produced similar outcomes (like Somali-American Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar representing a congressional district populated largely by Somali immigrants).Once the numbers of immigrants are large enough and geographically clustered, assimilation becomes optional and voting power is exercised along ethnic lines. The result is elected officials who treat American political power as a tool for advancing the interests of their group of origin.

Citizenship without English proficiency and without primary allegiance to the United States is a hollow status. Importing large numbers of immigrants who remain unassimilated, then watching them elect leaders who share that condition, is not an accident but is the predictable outcome of policy.

The remedy is not more rhetoric about diversity, it is lower immigration, an end to chain migration, and setting a clear expectation that those who come will fully adopt the language and civic culture of the country they claim as their own.

Until then, states like Michigan will keep falling. And so will the rest of the country.