New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, exalted the city’s legacy of immigrants on Friday in a historically laden, ideological counterpoint to a US semiquincentennial address that was expected later in the day from Donald Trump – who has sought to deport immigrants en masse throughout his second presidency.
Speaking from behind a desk at New York’s city hall that belonged to the US’s first president, George Washington, and which itself is a century older than the Resolute desk in the White House, Mamdani was surrounded by naturalized citizens like himself as he listed the waves of immigrants who shaped the city.
“Hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants arrived with stomachs aching from a famine manufactured by imperial cruelty,” Mamdani said. “Chinese sailors settled in what is today Chinatown. Millions more traveled under the Statue of Liberty and through Ellis Island. Jewish people escaping pogroms, Italians fleeing poverty. Syrians seeking economic opportunity.
He held it in front of recently naturalized immigrants. One line I’ll paraphrase I found interesting when he referred to them: they didn’t see themselves not just as New Yorkers, but American too, just like he did some 10 years ago.
This tells immigrants in New York that they may not be American (yet), but they are New Yorkers. Very beautiful notion.