New York City Mayor Mamdani honors immigrants in 250th birthday speech

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani marked America’s 250th birthday Friday with a City Hall speech centered on immigrants, citizenship and a definition of patriotism rooted in dissent, offering a counterpoint hours before President Donald Trump was expected to deliver his own semiquincentennial address in South Dakota.

Speaking from behind a desk that belonged to George Washington, Mamdani was surrounded by recently naturalized citizens. The setting carried personal significance for the mayor, who was born in Uganda, moved to the United States with his family at age 7 and became a naturalized citizen himself.

“Here, at City Hall, as I sit behind George Washington’s desk, I cannot see all of America,” Mamdani said. “But like so many who came before, I can see New York City. The city I see today looks very different from the one that greeted George Washington.”

Mamdani used the speech to describe New York as a gateway for generations of immigrants who reshaped the city. He cited Irish immigrants fleeing famine, Chinese sailors who settled in what is now Chinatown, Jewish people escaping pogroms, Italians fleeing poverty and Syrians seeking economic opportunity.

“Despite laws enacted by the federal government to bar their entry,” Mamdani said, immigrants “made homes here in New York City, and they helped to make New York City.”

He linked that history to his own family’s arrival in the United States.

“My family did not arrive by boat, although we saw the Statue of Liberty from the window of the plane,” he said. “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.”

Mamdani also reflected on the phrase “American exceptionalism,” rejecting the idea that the country’s greatness lies only in wealth or power.

“We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than anyone else,” he said. “The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here nothing is fixed into place.”

The mayor addressed the naturalized citizens in the room directly, telling them, “You each hold a special power. The power to determine what America means.”

He then criticized what he described as a narrower vision of the country.

“America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal,” Mamdani said. “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 speech came days after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an effort by Trump to end birthright citizenship and affirmed that nearly all people born on U.S. soil are citizens, The Guardian reported.

Mamdani also quoted Thomas Paine’s description of America as an asylum “for the persecuted lovers of civic and religious liberty,” then criticized current immigration enforcement.

“Today, too many of our leaders do not believe in a vision of this nation as an asylum for the persecuted, but rather as one that persecutes those seeking asylum,” he said.

He described “a city of contradictions in a nation of contradictions,” citing hunger, monopolies, oligarchs and “masked agents” taking undocumented residents away in unmarked vans. He also said the promise of America remains visible when neighbors protect one another “as ICE invades our neighborhoods” and when working people demand more “for their fellow Americans.”

Mamdani closed by rejecting the phrase “love it or leave it.”

“Patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws,” he 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.”

Trump was expected later Friday to speak at Mount Rushmore, where the anniversary celebration was set to include fireworks, military bands, aviation flyovers and a salute to the six branches of the armed forces.