Standing before a delirious crowd in Brooklyn on election night earlier this month, mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani promised his followers that New York would remain a “city of immigrants.” What did he mean by that? When people first started using the term nation of immigrants in the 20th century, in the wake of a book of that name by John F. Kennedy, it was taken as a bold paradox, even an oxymoron. Nations, by definition, are made up of people who are born (nati) with something in common. You can’t have a “nation” made up of people from elsewhere. Yet Americans, with their typical ingenuity, had built such a thing, and what a marvel it was. “Nation of immigrants” became a boast, and immigration, by extension, a virtue. It was surely this view that Mamdani had in mind.
But there are other, less prideful ways of understanding our immigrant heritage, and we are probably going to have to reacquaint ourselves with them.
