New York City was once the quintessentially American metropolis, the birthplace of John Jay and the home of the Roosevelts, the Astors, the Rockefellers, and the Vanderbilts, a forge of American industry, ingenuity, and culture. Now, New York is still the largest and most populous city in the U.S., but it’s become a multicultural, multiethnic bazaar, teeming with foreign languages, foreign foods, and foreign customs, carved up into ethnic immigrant enclaves. Last week, New York demonstrated just how deeply this foreign incursion has entrenched itself when voters elected a Ugandan-born Muslim and self-described socialist, Zohran Mamdani, as the city’s new mayor.

Across the country, Americans looked on in shock as Mamdani soared ahead in the polls, even besting former New York state governor Andrew Cuomo, son of another former New York governor, Mario Cuomo, and heir to the family’s now-toppled political dynasty. But the Ugandan-Indian Muslim’s ascent was not precipitated by a vacuum, but rather by years of lax and reckless immigration policy, transforming New York City from an American metropolitan monolith into a messy Mecca for new arrivals from the third world who have demonstrated no interest in assimilating to American culture.

NYC: Gateway to America

During the American Revolutionary War, New York City was captured by the British, halting what little immigration there was at the time. The journey from Europe to the New World was a long and arduous one, requiring weeks or even months at sea, and the war offered little promise of prosperity upon reaching America’s shore. However, once the War ended, New York City began reasserting itself as a hub for commerce, aided by its ports and relative ease of access to other burgeoning American cities, like Boston to the north and Philadelphia and Baltimore to the south.

The growing promise of success and fortune in the city attracted new arrivals, but only an estimated 35,000 people came to New York between the end of the war and 1820. The entirety of those new arrivals was European: merchants from England and loyalists who had fled during the war, laborers and workmen from British-dominated Ireland, Scottish Protestants, and German farmers made up the bulk of the new arrivals, but some Dutch and French immigrants also made their way to New York City.

At this time, the Naturalization Act of 1790 was the only real piece of legislation governing immigration, offering citizenship only to “free white persons” of “good character,” although the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 did allow for the arrest and deportation of foreigners considered “dangerous,” such as French radicals or anarchists. There was no central hub for processing immigrants, either, and immigration law was essentially enforced sporadically, with random checks by authorities at the wharves where ships would dock.

The next century would see an increasing surge in immigration to New York City, although immigrants still hailed almost exclusively from Europe. Federal immigration record-keeping began in 1820 as the city underwent an industrial and economic boom. New York City became the nation’s dominant port, particularly for immigrants. As many as three million immigrants arrived in the Big Apple between 1820 and 1880, the vast majority (nearly two million) from Ireland. Irish farmers, laborers, and peasants were fleeing the Great Famine, arriving in “coffin ships,” so named because many passengers died in transit due to overcrowding, lack of hygienic conditions, and disease. The Steerage Act of 1819 imposed regulations on passenger ships, in an effort to prevent overcrowding and the spread of disease, and required a passenger manifest. In part prompted by the arrival of the “coffin ships,” New York City opened Castle Garden, a formal inspection center for vetting and welcoming European immigrants and ensuring that the regulations of the Steerage Act were adhered to.

Half a million immigrants also arrived from England and Scotland, industrial workers eager to make a living in the new global center of commerce; over a million Germans fleeing the 1848 revolutions; and a handful of Scandinavians and Italians, mostly from Sicily. Workers built apartments, staffed factories, and constructed railroads. The 1862 Homestead Act promised land to those who moved west to settle, indirectly encouraging immigrants to make the long trek west and keeping New York from becoming overcrowded.

The next half century saw the greatest immigration influx into New York City yet: between 1880 and 1924, New York City officials processed some 12 million new arrivals. Many of those new arrivals continued their journey west, but the city’s population still quintupled in the space of 44 years. Once again, the new arrivals hailed from Europe. While the mid-1800s saw the Irish flood New York, the turn of the century saw millions of Italians move into the city, along with Slavs and Jews from Austria-Hungary, Russia, and later Poland, and hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Armenians fleeing slaughter and persecution at the hands of Muslim Ottomans.

The mass influx of the first quarter of the 20th century and the shock of the First World War prompted the U.S. to implement the 1924 Immigration Act, barring immigration from non-European countries, especially Asian countries, and limiting the number of immigrants who could be accepted from Europe to 165,000 per year, drastically cutting immigration across the board for the next four decades. The Great Depression and the Second World War further cut the flow of immigrants in half. By 1910, roughly 40% of New York City’s population was foreign-born (again, almost entirely European), but the foreign-born population fell to less than 20% by 1950 as the Immigration Act took effect.

New York City’s founding stock and the first wave of immigration in the decades immediately following the end of the Revolutionary War laid the city’s ethnic foundation of English, Irish, and Germans. For the next century, immigration to the city was comprised almost exclusively of those ethnicities. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that Southern and Eastern Europeans began arriving in meaningful numbers. Even then, almost all immigrants arriving in New York City before 1965 shared two common traits with both each other and those already living in the city: European ancestry and Christian faith.

Assimilation was relatively easy, as newcomers often shared European or European-based customs, a European understanding of law and culture, and a Christian faith with New Yorkers. In fact, New York City itself was based upon and rooted in European culture, law, and tradition. Before it became America’s most iconic metropolitan titan, New York City was a Dutch settlement called New Amsterdam. Its grid streets and early governance closely mirrored those of Dutch settlements in the Netherlands and Batavia. Once the colonial city became the property of the English in 1664, it adopted English common law and rooted its governance in the Magna Carta, one of the foundational legal documents of the Western world. Much of the city’s governance structure is directly drawn from European roots, with the existing strong mayor-city council-borough presidents arrangement rooted in European customs, rather than Asian, African, or Middle Eastern forms of governance. In fact, the city’s government system, established by the 1686 Dongan Charter, was modeled directly on the government of London.

Many of the city’s most iconic buildings (Grand Central Terminal was designed in the Beaux-Arts style, directly imported from Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts, while the Federal-style architecture of City Hall was inspired by French and English neoclassical architecture, which was itself modeled after the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome) pay homage to the city’s European heritage, while the grand churches (both Trinity Church and St. Patrick’s Cathedral were gothic revival structures, inspired by late medieval English and French churches) explicated the union between the city’s European heritage and its Christian roots. Even education was distinctly European: Columbia University’s curriculum was modeled after those of Oxford and Cambridge, while New York University was inspired by the European liberal arts tradition.

There were, of course, some difficulties and some conflict, particularly as the Irish began arriving en masse in the mid-19th century; their Catholic brand of Christianity was seen as subversive and potentially treasonous by many Protestants, and Nativist groups were concerned that Americans would soon be replaced by foreigners. Catholic Italians also caused a stir, particularly as organized crime began to take root under the banner of the mafia. But none of these difficulties would compare to what followed the Hart-Celler Act.

The Remaking of New York

Officially the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the Hart-Celler Act eliminated many of the quotas and safeguards implemented by the 1924 Immigration Act, drastically liberalizing U.S. immigration policy. At the apex of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the nation’s immigration laws came to be derided as racially discriminatory, favoring white Europeans, particularly from the west and north of the continent, over other would-be immigrants. Senators Philip Hart (D-Mich.) and Emanuel Celler (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation to right the supposed wrong, doing away with nearly all previous immigration restrictions.

Between 1924 and 1965, a period of 41 years, New York City saw roughly half a million immigrant arrivals. Between 1968, when the Hart-Celler Act went into effect, and the year 2000, a period of only 32 years, New York City saw nearly five million immigrants arrive. Unlike prior decades, only a few hundred thousand were European. The vast majority came from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia: over half a million abandoning the Dominican Republic, hundreds of thousands coming from impoverished Puerto Rico, a quarter million from Jamaica and Haiti, 400,000 Chinese fleeing the communist brutality of Mao Zedong, 200,000 workers from India seeking jobs in America, and refugees from the Korean and Vietnam Wars. And those are only legal immigrants. President Ronald Reagan’s Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 granted amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, over 500,000 of whom were residing in New York City and were now given no reason to leave.

By 2000, New York City’s foreign-born population had risen again, sitting now at over a third (36%). Over 170 different languages were spoken in the city, and immigrant groups carved out their own enclaves, with Washington Heights transforming from a relatively small neighborhood of single-family homes to a chaotic mess of brownstone apartment buildings and townhouses populated by Dominican and Cuban newcomers.

Security increased temporarily following the September 11 terrorist attacks, but the “global economy” once again drove immigration back up. Progressives obsessed with diversity quotas and Reagan-era conservatives fixated on the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) both found new ways to usher more and more foreigners into the U.S., with New York City accepting roughly three million immigrants between 2000 and 2020. Once again, hardly any of the new arrivals hailed from Europe, instead coming from Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala, China, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ghana, Syria, Iraq, and other non-European nations. As of last year, roughly 40% of New York City’s population is foreign-born and nearly one-fifth are noncitizens. Additionally, the majority (62%) of children in New York live in a household with at least one foreign-born family member.

New York City’s post-Hart-Celler demographic makeup has fundamentally reshaped the city’s population and identity. No longer is there a shared ethnic background, nor even the loose bonds of a common European culture and the firmer bonds of a shared belief in Christ and His teachings. America’s government was designed for a Christian people and is deeply rooted in the traditions of the West. Sharing this cultural and historical background allowed European immigrants over the years to readily understand and assimilate to New York City’s culture, its laws, its customs, and its identity. This background is not one shared so deeply or so readily by those from South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The culture, laws, and customs to which they are accustomed and which they bring with them are not easily compatible with those which have governed and built New York City throughout the centuries. Over the past 60 years, New York City has imported nearly 10 million immigrants, largely from third-world countries.

Mayor Mamdani

“Thank you to those so often forgotten by the politics of our city who made this movement their own,” New York City’s Ugandan-born Muslim mayor-elect said in his victory speech last Tuesday. “I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties,” he declared. Mamdani’s comment was not a mere show of gratitude to a crucial voting bloc: the foreigner-turned-mayor was acknowledging that his fellow foreigners in New York City elected him because they are foreigners and he is a foreigner.

Hispanic, Asian, African, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern immigrants overwhelmingly vote as ethnic blocs, often based on shared ethnic interests. Multiplestudies have found that Hispanic immigrants tend to favor political candidates who pledge immigration liberalization and anti-discrimination policies, voting for such candidates anywhere from 60% to 75% of the time. A 2018 study conducted by Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal examined voting data from 2000 to 2016, concluding that Hispanic immigrants vote cohesively for Democrats due to “shared ethnic cues,” with turnout and bloc strength increasing in areas with high immigrant density.

Likewise, Asian immigrants also typically vote as a series of blocs, based upon national origin. According to the 2020 Asian American Voter Survey, Chinese, Indian, Filipino, and other Asian voters largely support Democrats, citing immigration and anti-discrimination policies as motivating factors, in addition to influence from ethnic social networks.

Second-generation Asian immigrants have also capitalized on social media to build ethnic-oriented social media networks and actually vote as a more cohesive bloc than their parents. Middle Eastern immigrants also tend to vote as an ethnic bloc, solidifying behind the Democratic Party following September 11, 2001. A 2004 Migration Policy Institute report found that first-generation immigrants (roughly 40% of New York City’s current population) almost always vote ethnically, while the trend tends to weaken over successive generations. However, immigrant enclaves — such as those in New York — amplify ethnic bloc voting trends.

There are some outliers. Vietnamese and Cuban immigrants, for example, tend to buck the trend and vote for Republicans, often citing their own experiences with communist totalitarianism and the GOP’s opposition to left-wing authoritarianism. Likewise, Iranian immigrants are more likely to support Republicans than their fellow Middle-Eastern immigrants due to Republicans’ strong stance against the Iranian regime. But these are the exceptions that prove the rule: short of escaping a brutal totalitarian regime or communist dictatorship, the majority of immigrant groups vote as ethnic blocs and favor whichever candidate embraces policies supporting the immigrant groups.

Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda. His Ugandan father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a “postcolonialism” academic, and his Indian mother, Mira Nair, is a filmmaker. In an interview from 2013, Nair affirmed that her son is “not an American at all.” She described Mamdani as “a total desi,” a Hindustani term often used to refer to an ethnic Indian living abroad. “We are not firangs at all,” she added. The term “firang,” often considered a racial slur, is a pejorative used to describe Westerners, especially Americans. “He is very much us. He is not an Uhmericcan (American) at all. He was born in Uganda, raised between India and America. He is at home in many places. He thinks of himself as a Ugandan and as an Indian.”

Throughout his campaign, Mamdani laid great emphasis on his foreignness. His campaign logo was modeled after Bollywood film posters, his campaign videos and ads were often bi- or multilingual, and his campaign signs and pamphlets were printed in dozens of languages, from Spanish to Hindi to Urdu. He also focused his campaign events on immigrant enclaves, particularly Asian, Middle Eastern, and Muslim areas, ultimately doubling turnout among Muslim voters compared to 2021’s mayoral election. According to exit polls, a majority of every racial demographic voted for Mamdani, except for white voters. Additionally, only 43% of Protestants, 33% of Catholics, and 32% of Jews voted for Mamdani, while those of “other” religions, such as Islam and Hindu, voted for Mamdani by over 70%.

In the historical crime epic film “Gangs of New York,” centered on the real-life conflicts between Nativist gangs and new Irish immigrants in the mid-1800s, William “Boss” Tweed, the head of the Democratic Party’s political machine at Tammany Hall, points to the Irish disembarking their ships and refers to them as “the building of our country right there… Americans aborning.” Bill “the Butcher” Cutting, based on the real-life Nativist and gang leader William Poole, replies, “I don’t see no Americans. I see trespassers.” He asks Tweed, “What have they done? Name one thing they’ve contributed.” Tweed smiles and answers, “Votes.” New York City’s politically successful still use Tweed’s playbook, but have learned that white European immigrants will no longer do.

Mamdani did not campaign as a Democrat. He did not campaign as an American. He campaigned as a foreigner. “New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant,” he declared in his victory speech. America’s increasingly permissive immigration laws and policies, from the Hart-Celler Act to Reagan’s amnesty to President Joe Biden’s open borders, fundamentally transformed New York City from America’s most iconic metropolis into a cannibalized urban carcass populated by foreigners. The near-total eradication of the American demographic from the city resulted in Mamdani’s victory — it would have resulted in victory for almost anyone who campaigned on the platform, “You are a foreigner and so am I.”