Independence Day is all about diversity, immigrants, and change — not about Americans, their children, and their self-evident foundations, according to New York’s ethnic Indian Muslim immigrant Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
“Tomorrow, our nation marks 250 years since we declared our independence,” Mamdani declared July 3 as he placed diversity and immigrants at the center of American history in place of Americans and their revolutionary ideals.
That historical reframing was accentuated by Mamdani’s decision to speak from a desk that belonged to George Washington, alongside 10 new legal immigrants — including two women wearing Islamic hoods — instead of alongside ordinary Americans.
He dismissed Americans and their vast accomplishments in a few words — “The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon” — while describing migrants as the oppressed builders of American society:
[New York] harbor was busy [in the 1830s] as ships poured in from around the world. Hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants arrived with stomachs aching from a famine manufactured by imperial cruelty. 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 feeling fleeing poverty, Syrians seeking economic opportunity.
Each of these new arrivals peered through portholes onto a city that was changing as fast as the nation. They saw merchants peddling their wares on the docks, streets being laid out on a grid, buildings rising into the clouds. They could not yet see the nativism they would face, the jobs they would be refused, the landlords who would not rent to them, and the abject labor and living conditions they would withstand. But no matter how much smog hung over the harbor, they still saw an opportunity to begin anew.
For Mamdani the ethnic-Indian immigrant, New York City and America are caste societies of power and wealth, which all must be changed:
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.
“What power each of us holds to bring America ever closer to the greatness so many have seen when they [as migrants] looked upon these shores,” he declared.
But the founders and their declaration actually did fix Americans’ foundational ideals into place, including their denial of caste and power for any subset of humans:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Mamdani’s demand for migrant power helped him and his incongruous coalition win his election to Mayor in 2025. But that outsider message is at war with the Declaration of Independence, which was written by Americans for Americans:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people [Americans] to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth… a decent respect to the opinions of mankind [non-Americans] requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Similarly, the Constitution was written by and for Americans, not to serve immigrant politicians seeking to build a green-and-red alliance of politicized resentments:
We the [existing] People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
For Mamdani, politicized migrants hold the power to overthrow their perpetual oppressors:
You each hold a special power, the power to determine what America means. The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, 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. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit. How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal.
Human nature changes little, and so Mamdani’s parochial perspective is commonplace in a high-migration society. Many once-important migrants are unable to deflate their home-village pride as they land in Americans’ grand society, even as their American-born kids recognize their upward trajectory in America.
But the “better angels” of human nature can lead Americans onwards, zig-zag, via politics, to a society of greater freedom and prosperity. So here is Kentucky-born Abraham Lincoln speaking about the Civil War’s Gettysburg battle on July 1-3, 1863:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal… we here highly resolve that these [battlefield] dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
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