Zohran Mamdani: Immigrants are America’s ‘best’, not ‘worst’

The Story in Brief

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, in a speech marking America’s 250th Independence Day on July 4, 2026, flipped the familiar anti-immigrant trope on its head. '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,' he said. Instead, he argued, the US was built by Puritans, Sikhs, Quakers, Muslims, Jews, peasants, and serfs, those banished or oppressed elsewhere. Mamdani, who arrived from Uganda as a seven-year-old, recalled seeing the Statue of Liberty from a plane window. He wove the story of the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Brooklyn into a call for inclusive patriotism, saying 'opportunities … are not given, they are won.' The Times of India reported his address as a defence of migration as central to American identity.