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THE LONG ARC OF IMMIGRANT POWER IN NEW YORK  
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Waleed Shahid
November 6, 2025
Waleed's Substack
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_ What Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech shares with the Irish ward
bosses and Jewish socialists who built the city’s first
immigrant-powered coalitions. _

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On election night, ZOHRAN MAMDANI stood before a crowd of campaign
volunteers in Bronx and said something that, in another century, might
have come from the steps of Tammany Hall. “We will fight for you,
because we are you,” he began. “Ana minkum wa alaikum.” Then he
called the roll of his coalition: Yemeni bodega owners, Mexican
abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers, Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line
cooks, Ethiopian aunties, South Asian delivery drivers. It was a
moment of recognition—for communities that had long kept the city
running without ever feeling like the city was theirs.

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New York’s political life has always been a nexus of immigration,
xenophobia, and realignment. Each new wave of arrivals has transformed
the city’s parties and power structures, from the Irish Catholics
who captured Tammany Hall in the late 19th century to the Jewish and
Italian tenement workers who built the unions and socialist movements
of the early 20th to Black and Latino transformations during the civil
rights movement.

Mamdani’s rise comes amid its own modern strain of
suspicion—Islamophobia, anti-immigrant politics, and the quiet
bigotry that still shadows those whose faith or surnames mark them as
foreign. It rhymes with the 19th-century fear of Catholic immigrants
and the early-20th-century hysteria over “radical” Jews and
Italians—each era finding new language for the same anxiety about
belonging.

The first great breakthrough came in 1880, when WILLIAM R. GRACE, an
Irish-born Catholic shipping magnate, became New York’s first
immigrant mayor. His election was a crack in the wall of Protestant
dominance that had ruled the city since its founding. Only a few
decades earlier, the Know-Nothing Party had treated Catholic
immigrants as a civilizational threat. Grace’s win was the city’s
quiet answer: the immigrant could not only belong, but lead—a rhyme
Mamdani would recognize in a new century.

For the first time, an ethnic and religious minority—despised by
xenophobes as “drunkards and papists”—had seized control of City
Hall. Within a decade, Tammany Hall had remade itself in Grace’s
image, transforming from a genteel club into an Irish-Catholic machine
that traded favors for votes and delivered something like democracy
through patronage to people who’d never had it. For poor immigrants,
Tammany wasn’t a story about corruption; it was proof that the
system could finally see them.

[William Russell Grace - Wikipedia]
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By the 1920S, Irish immigrants became the political establishment,
embodied by MAYOR JIMMY WALKER, the silk-hatted son of the machine.
Walker was rakish, funny, and entirely at ease in the moral gray zone
that had once scandalized elites. Under his reign, politics became a
jazz-age spectacle of favors and excess. But his glamour disguised
decay. The machine that had once fought for immigrants had become a
gatekeeper against newer ones—Italians, Jews, and Eastern
Europeans—whose sweat powered the city’s factories but who rarely
saw their reflection in its politics.

[Jimmy Walker May Have Been NYC's Most Corrupt Mayor, but Damn was he
Fun]
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Those white ethnic newcomers found their voice in MORRIS HILLQUIT, a
Jewish socialist lawyer who, in 1917, ran for mayor on a platform of
rent control, union rights, and opposition to the First World War.
Hillquit’s 22 percent of the vote shocked the political
establishment. He didn’t win, but he proved that a tenement-based
working class—Jewish seamstresses, Italian dockworkers, the radical
press—could function as a political bloc. For his trouble, he and
his allies were branded traitors. Five Socialist legislators from
immigrant districts were expelled from the state assembly. Yet the
genie was out of the bottle: class solidarity and immigrant politics
had become a political movement of its own.

[Morris Hillquit | Holocaust Encyclopedia]
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In 1922, during a bruising congressional campaign, Fiorello La Guardia
was accused of antisemitism by a rival who assumed the charge would
stick. La Guardia’s answer was pure theater and pure New York: he
dictated a reply in YIDDISH, the language of his accuser’s own
voters, and challenged the man to debate him in it. The
invitation—audacious, funny, and devastating—went unanswered. It
was La Guardia at his most revealing: turning the politics of identity
into a performance of fluency, using wit to remind New Yorkers that he
was not an outsider looking in but a reflection of the city itself.

[A New Mayor, and A Memorable Predecessor - Tenement Museum]
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La Guardia’s mother was Jewish and his father an Italian Catholic
who had long since drifted from faith. He grew up navigating a world
of languages and neighborhoods—Italian in the kitchen, Yiddish on
the street, English in the classroom. Yet despite his mother’s
Jewish roots, La Guardia never publicly identified as Jewish;
historians suggest he avoided doing so because he believed it would be
“self-serving” and preferred his identity to be rooted in his
immigrant background rather than a single faith tradition.

When La Guardia finally became mayor—after the Seabury
Investigations had shredded the old party machine and the Depression
had destroyed the old ethnic and political loyalties—he drew on that
same fluency. He built a coalition made not only of tenement renters
but of middle-class reformers, spanning Italian, Jewish, Irish, and
Polish neighborhoods. Backed by the New Deal, he transformed city
government from a dispenser of jobs into a provider of public assets.
As fascism darkened Europe, La Guardia turned his multilingual empathy
into policy—denouncing Adolf Hitler, promoting boycotts of German
goods, and making City Hall a kind of civic refuge for the city’s
persecuted immigrants.

[Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia – History of New York City]
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Every phase of political transformation in New York City was met with
a wave of bigotry. Grace faced anti-Catholic hysteria; Hillquit, the
Red Scare; La Guardia, whispers that he was too foreign to be trusted.
But the city’s demographic tide kept rising, and each wave of
immigrants redrew the boundary between outsider and insider.

Each of these figures widened New York’s circle of belonging, though
never evenly. Grace’s rise gave Irish Catholics a seat at the table
but left the city’s Black residents and Caribbean migrants
untouched. Hillquit’s Socialists built interracial alliances with
Black labor organizers like A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, even
as their broader movement still treated race as secondary to class. La
Guardia, decades later, went further—appointing Black and Puerto
Rican officials, investigating discrimination in Harlem, and
campaigning in Spanish—but even his reform coalition operated within
a segregated city. The city’s circle of belonging widened in fits
and starts, stretching to include new voices even as old hierarchies
tugged at its edges.

Nonetheless Mamdani’s Queens feels like it rhymes with La
Guardia’s base in East Harlem and the Lower East Side—blocks of
working-class renters who keep the city humming and yet pass invisibly
through it.

The tenement floor now lives on a scooter and in an app: delivery
riders with plastic ponchos, rideshare drivers orbiting JFK at 2 a.m.,
home-health aides and night-shift nurses catching the dawn train. Many
are immigrants; most are tired. They’re the heirs of the garment
cutters and dockhands who once packed Socialist rallies and crowded
Tammany ward halls, the same stubborn coalition of people who make the
city run before the city remembers their names.

In his victory speech, Mamdani named them. “To every New Yorker in
Kensington and Midwood and Hunts Point, know this: this city is your
city, and this democracy is yours too.”

New York has never changed by polite inheritance. Each coalition
elbows its way in, and in doing so redraws the borders of “we.”
Grace cracked the door; Walker swung it wide and nearly lost it;
Hillquit mapped the immigrant tenement workers; La Guardia built a
floor sturdy enough to stand on.

Now, in a city remade by migration once again, Mamdani’s
bloc—bodega owners and nurses, young socialists, cabdrivers and the
children of immigrants who bring your groceries to the fifth
floor—is testing whether the city can still renew itself from the
bottom up.

History’s answer tends to be yes. When New York seems sealed,
someone new finds the key.

_Waleed Shahid is a Democratic strategist and movement organizer. He
played a key role in launching the Green New Deal campaign and
successfully recruiting and electing working-class progressives such
as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, and Summer
Lee. __Waleed’s Substack_ [[link removed]]_ is a
reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my
work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._

* Zohran Mamdani
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* Fiorello La Guardia
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* New York City (406
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* Immigrants
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