New York City Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani used a Fourth of July-themed America 250 address on Friday to sharply criticize U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), billionaire Elon Musk, and what he called an “arena of supremacy” in the United States, delivering a speech centered on immigration, inequality, and America’s founding ideals.
Standing alongside eight newly naturalized American citizens, Mamdani framed his remarks around the nation’s immigrant heritage, referencing the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island before pivoting to a broader critique of modern America. Without mentioning Musk by name, he also took aim at the entrepreneur, who became the world’s first trillionaire following SpaceX’s long-awaited initial public offering last month.
“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,” Mamdani said, without naming Musk. “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”
He continued by contrasting the labor of ordinary Americans with the concentration of wealth among the nation’s elite.
“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.”
Speaking from George Washington’s desk, Mamdani praised generations of immigrants who, he said, persevered through discrimination and hardship to build lives in New York City.
“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,” the mayor said.
He argued that the promise of America has repeatedly drawn people seeking freedom and opportunity.
“That legacy of every generation of Americans insisting that the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness extends to them, too, is no relic of the past. It carried millions of Black Americans north during the Great Migration. It drew hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans to New York City after the Second World War. It invited countless others from the West Indies and South Asia and West Africa and across the world. And it is what brought my family to this city when I was seven years old.”
Although Mamdani spoke about his family’s immigration story, he did not mention that his father is a Harvard professor or that his mother is an internationally recognized filmmaker.
“My family did not arrive by boat, although we saw the Statue of Liberty from the window of the plane. Even from the air, we could make out the promise of America, the promise of the beautiful patriotic work of rendering America, year after year, a little more faithful to its founding ideals,” he said.
The mayor also challenged traditional notions of American exceptionalism, arguing that the nation’s story has often been shaped by people who were dismissed or marginalized by those in power.
“There is a term so often used to describe our nation and those who have shaped it. American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism, the conventional wisdom tells us, makes our freedom a little more free. It is how we dug the Erie Canal and irrigated the West. (It) is why children in faraway lands grow up dreaming of one day moving here. And, yet, the irony is that the story of America has so often been written by those who were told by others with power and influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional,” Mamdani 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.
“It sent Puritans and Sikhs and Quakers and Muslims and Jewish people who were banished for praying the wrong way, worshiping the wrong gods, angering the wrong people. It sent peasants and serfs from slums and shuttles who were treated as less because they hardly owned clothes, let alone land. It sent immigrants from whom power was something someone else had.”
He concluded that America’s uniqueness lies not in its power or wealth but in its ability to change.
“We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else. The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here nothing is fixed into place.”
Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2018 after moving to New York at age seven, reflected on his own citizenship experience while addressing the new Americans standing beside him.
“Nearly a decade ago, I too felt what you feel the joy of no longer being just a New Yorker but an American too. You each hold a special power. The power to determine what America means,” the mayor said.
He then accused powerful interests of defining America as a place reserved for only a select few.
“The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy where only a select few are allowed freedom,” Mamdani said. “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. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit. How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal. At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another.”
The mayor also condemned ICE operations in New York, claiming the agency was invading local neighborhoods.
“We see America each time neighbors link arms with neighbors without asking how long they have lived here or what papers they have as ICE invades our neighborhoods,” he added. “We see America each time those young and old stand in the beating rain or the stifling heat to cast their ballots. We see America each time working people demand more, not just for themselves, but for their fellow Americans.”
Mamdani rejected the notion that patriotism requires unquestioning support for the country, arguing instead that dissent is itself an expression of love for America.
“There are some who respond to those who ask for more from America with a simple refrain. ‘Love it or leave it,’ they say. But patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws. Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent,” Mamdani said. “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 concluded the address with an optimistic appeal for the nation’s future.
“What power each of us holds to bring America ever closer to the greatness so many have seen when they looked upon these shores. The greatness that for 250 years has been America. Thank you. God bless America. God bless New York City. And happy Fourth of July,” he concluded.
{Matzav.com}
