New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivered a powerful speech on July 4, 2026, on the occasion of America’s 250th birthday, addressing the burning issue of migration, weaving in his story of coming to the US as well. “The city I see today looks very different than the one that greeted George Washington. In July of 1776, our city simmered under the yoke of oppression. The British had imposed a colonial rule so repressive that 250 years ago, 80 miles south, a small group of newspaper editors, farmers, and soldiers signed their names on a document declaring truths that feel self-evident now, but were revolutionary then, establishing the ideals our nation still strives to fulfill,” he said.“The British did not take it well. War broke out. And that August, as the largest battle of the Revolutionary War unfolded in Brooklyn, batteries on Governor’s Island took aim at British ships anchored just offshore. We were outgunned, we were outmanned, and we were soundly defeated. After only a few months, it appeared our fledgling attempt at democracy was on the precipice of collapse.”“But that night, with the moon overhead, thousands of our soldiers silently climbed into ferries and flat-bottomed boats and escaped to Manhattan. The Continental Army survived to fight another day. Independence may have been declared in Philadelphia, but it was rescued in New York City.”“George Washington was the last to leave Brooklyn. As he waited at the river’s edge, the sun beginning its rise, he would have looked out over New York City’s waters and seen what so many have seen in the 250 years since, an opportunity to begin anew. Those opportunities, like everything in New York City, are not given, they are won.”
My family did not arrive by boat
In his speech, he recounted the waves of migration that happened in phases to America. “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.”“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.”
American exceptionalism
Mamdani said American exceptionalism makes freedom more free. “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, worshipping the wrong gods, angering the wrong people. It sent peasants and serfs from slums and shtetls who were treated as less because they hardly owned clothes, let alone land. It sent immigrants for whom power was something someone else had.”“What a privilege each of us has to live in a nation that every one of its inhabitants can shape. What a responsibility each of us possesses to prove ourselves worthy of all those who came before. 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.”
