Mamdani Delivers Pro-Immigration America 250 Address

New York City's mayor used the eve of Independence Day to turn a patriotic backdrop into a pointed pro-immigration speech. Speaking July 3 from behind George Washington's desk at City Hall and surrounded by new Americans, Zohran Mamdani cast the US as a nation constantly reshaped by immigrants—and warned that current federal policies threaten that legacy. "The city I see today looks very different than the one that greeted George Washington in July of 1776," he said. The Ugandan-born, naturalized 34-year-old recalled spotting the Statue of Liberty as a 7-year-old and told the newly naturalized citizens, "The joy of no longer just being a New Yorker, but an American, too," was something he shared with them, USA Today reports.

• The democratic socialist mayor did not name President Trump but repeatedly jabbed at the administration's hardline approach, including ICE surges into major cities. "We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans," he said.
• "For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best," Mamdani said, per the AP, in an apparent reference to Trump's rhetoric. "Those ideals upon which our nation was built—they are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them."
• Mamdani listed waves of immigrants, saying they had made New York City their home and helped to make the city, despite federal laws aimed at keeping them out, the Guardian reports. "Hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants arrived with stomachs aching from a famine manufactured by imperial cruelty," he 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."

• Mamdani spoke out against "those who led through exclusion and isolation," saying that in the view of the powerful, America is "an arena of supremacy where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin," he said. "The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit. How small they are. How weak, how unoriginal."
• "Patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws," the mayor said. "Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent. It is every march led under the heavy sun. It is every protest held a decade before its time. It is precisely because we love this nation that we will not leave it," he said, per CBS News. "Ours is a nation working each day towards the perfection in which it was conceived," he said. "A nation striving each day to better itself. Therein lies the work of America—the striving, the bettering, the reaching for perfection."
• The remarks came as Trump prepared his own July 3 address at Mount Rushmore, part of the run-up to the country's 250th anniversary celebrations.