On Tuesday night, election results showed that voters in New York City had selected Uganda-born, self-proclaimed socialist Zohran Mandami as the Democrat candidate for New York City mayor. If Mandami’s win tells us anything, it’s that immigration policy is not just about border security, it’s about whether the United States survives.
As Fox News’ Laura Ingraham said in a post on X, “You think NYC’s turn to socialism and communism is just a ‘New York’ thing? It’s not. Uncontrolled immigration, green-lit since the 80s by the Uniparty, is remaking every American community. We imported anti-Americanism, cultivated it in schools. Now comes the poisonous crop.”
Ingraham is right: It’s not just New York City. The demographic and ideological reshaping is happening elsewhere across the country. It’s in Hamtramck, Michigan, a small town that became “flooded” with immigrants and became the “first Muslim-majority city,” according to the Detroit Free Press.
“The nation’s first and only all-Muslim City Council had just voted to rename Holbrook Avenue — one of Hamtramck’s main arteries — Palestine Avenue, in reaction to the Israel-Hamas war, then in its fourth month,” John Carlisle wrote. “The road was originally named after Dewitt Holbrook, a 19th-Century lawyer who owned a farm not far from this very spot. The name had stuck for about 125 years. Until this day.”
As described by Carlisle, first came Bangladeshi and Yemeni immigrants, turning the once Catholic town into a Muslim majority town. It was a cultural revolution.
“Women now walked the streets robed from head to toe in black niqabs, where the signs on the storefronts were now written in scripts foreign to [the Polish and Catholic community that once thrived], where schools replaced Easter vacation with time off at the end of Ramadan, and where the sound of the Islamic call to prayer now competed with the tones of church bells,” Carlisle wrote.
Hamtrack, Carlisle explained, once filled with bars, now lives under a “culture that forbids alcohol.”
A similar shift happened in Dearborn, which became the first Arab-majority city in the United States in 2023. One local told BBC last year that Dearborn is “the motherland away from the motherland.” Earlier this year a protester at a pro-Palestine fundraiser vowed to bring down the “American empire” during an event held at a local cafe, according to the Daily Mail.
This is the real-life consequence of immigration policies that have allowed mass legal migration without any consideration for assimilation and cultural cohesion. Multiculturalism always ends with ideological replacement — and it’s being codified by foreign-born politicians using their positions of power to, for example, shield illegal aliens and defend mass migration precisely because it dilutes the cultural and social foundations of America.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who was born in India and naturalized in 2000, recently issued a call to action to oppose immigration enforcement, demanding “ICE raids” end. Her comments came in light of the anti-ICE riots in Los Angeles. Meanwhile Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar reportedly went so far as to make a video tutorial for how illegal aliens should evade ICE.
These politicians aren’t here to preserve America as it was when they arrived. They — and foreign-born citizens and residents — are here to reshape America into the image of the countries they left.
While just about every American knows foreigners who have become patriotic, contributing fellow citizens, the pitfalls of mass migration cannot be ignored.
Mass migration of foreigners breaks down cultural cohesion, civic loyalty and national identity — which is exactly why the Founders were cautious about the admission of foreigners — especially in government.
In a letter to George Washington, John Jay wrote: “Permit me to hint, whether it would not be wise and seasonable to provide a strong check to the admission of Foreigners into the administration of our national Government.”
Elbridge Gerry “wished that in future the eligibility might be confined to Natives. Foreign powers will intermeddle in our affairs, and spare no expence to influence them. Persons having foreign attachments will be sent among us and insinuated into our councils, in order to be made instruments for their purposes.”
James Madison “wished to invite foreigners of merit and republican principles among us.” But he believed (perhaps naively) that while there were dangers associated with foreigners “obtain[ing] appointments,” it would not happen in “any dangerous degree.” Madison opined that “our own people [would] prefer natives of this Country to [foreigners],” thereby remedying his concern.
The founders understood what most won’t admit today: Self-government based on natural rights is not a default reality. It is the product of a specific moral order, a common culture, and a people capable of sustaining the responsibilities that freedom demands.
Alexander Hamilton said as much in 1799: “I hold with Montesquieu, that a government must be fitted to a nation, as much as a coat to the individual; and, consequently, that what may be good at Philadelphia may be bad at Paris, and ridiculous at Petersburg.”
In other words, not every people is capable of enjoying — or ensuring — political freedom because of radically different civilizational assumptions. Importing a large number of people from nations where liberty does not thrive — where tribalism, theocracy, and socialism reign supreme — and making no demand of assimilation doesn’t create a melting pot. It creates a powder keg.
The founders knew this, and that’s why they viewed immigration not as an entitlement, but a responsibility that must be carefully managed, lest the republic fall into the civilizational chaos the United States is seeing now.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
