New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s speech to commemorate the country’s 250th anniversary laid waste to the MAGA movement’s bigoted worldview.
It was a speech very reminiscent of Barack Obama and Frederick Douglass, in that Mamdani expressed pride in the nation’s founding principles — as laid out in America’s founding documents, at least — but also frustration over the prejudice that has been, and continues to be, promoted by people in power.
Flanked on Friday by newly naturalized American citizens, and delivered from behind a desk used by George Washington, Mamdani rebuked the hypocrisy of immigrants being demonized in a nation built by immigrants and enslaved people: “As we mark 250 years, what do we see? We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions.”
Mamdani denounced what he framed as influential oligarchs and the federal immigration agents involved in President Donald Trump’s racist anti-immigrant crackdown:
We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world — one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more. We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans. We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands — those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone. And we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few.
Mamdani said immigrants to the United States — including Jewish people escaping pogroms, Italians fleeing poverty and Syrians in search of economic opportunity — couldn’t predict “the nativism they would face” and the discrimination they’d experience, but he touted their belief in what the country could be.
“No matter how much smog hung over the harbor, they still saw an opportunity to begin anew,” he said. “Over the years that followed, despite laws enacted by the federal government to bar their entry, despite sweatshop fires that killed hundreds of women, despite riots aimed at their very existence, immigrants made homes here in New York City. And they helped to make New York City.”
