Victor Davis Hanson: Why Mamdani Wants to Erase Europeans From New York’s Immigration History

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Jack Fowler: Bill Jacobson, my pal—I love Bill. He’s the founder of Legal Insurrection.. 

He’s just a great guy. He posted this on X about this New York City immigrant enclaves map put out by the Mamdani administration, which said something like this had already been put out by the prior mayor. 

But Bill says, “Understand what’s going on here. It’s to erase European heritage in New York City. Children will grow up thinking New York City was created by the Third World. It’s symptomatic of what has happened in our education system.” 

So infamously here, there’s no Little Italy. New York has five boroughs—The Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island—and each of them has their Italian enclaves, but you won’t find a Little Italy in any of them. 

No. 

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The huge Irish community that’s still in New York City—I grew up in one, Woodlawn—it’s not there. But you’ll find Little Tibet, Little Bangladesh, Little Ecuador, Little Guyana, Little Manila, Little Odessa, etc. 

So Victor, two things. Is Bill right? Is this part of the willfulness? And while it’s fine to have ethnic neighborhoods, is this also anti E pluribus unum in some way? Your thoughts. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, oh, it is. But you’ve got to remember that this guy, [Zohran] Mamdani, is not a modest person. Most people would think it was a fluke that he got elected to the greatest city in the world, but that’s not how he thinks. He thinks this is a stepping stone to much greater, wider things. 

And so he is talking globalist all the time. He weighs in on global issues—Israel, the Palestinians, Iran. Mamdani says he’s going to arrest Netanyahu when he steps foot in New York. 

In this globalist vision, he wants to get on record that his city is just a conglomeration of all these different nations in the world, with one asterisk: In his world, immigration really didn’t start until 1965. European immigration, thanks to Teddy Kennedy’s immigration reforms, ended, and immigration from the former British Commonwealth—New Zealand, Australia, etc.—declined. 

We instead took people from what we used to call, and I don’t know if it’s a dirty word or not, the former Third World. 

So he thinks the world was started then. When he talks about immigrants, he doesn’t mean the hardworking Italians. He doesn’t mean the hardworking Jews. He doesn’t mean the hardworking Irish, all of whom came in enormous numbers and all were very poor. 

And they built the country. 

He thinks only the people—when he says immigrants built this country, that’s kind of a racist thing, because he’s only talking about people who are non-European. That’s what he means. 

And this country was, basically, with Black people making up about 10% of the population, about 85% of the population White, and about 5% Asian and 5% Hispanic for most of its history until about 1965 or 1970. 

So he’s wiping all of those people out, and he’s just saying that people like himself—the Indian diaspora, the South American diaspora, the African diaspora—these are the real immigrants who built America. That’s what he means. 

He’s an Orwellian figure. He really does want to use language and communication to wipe out large areas of knowledge. He thinks that by making maps like this… 

This map could have come right out of “1984”. It doesn’t exist, everybody. There is no Jewish community. There is no Italian community. There is no Irish community. Oh, you object? I must have forgotten. I’m sorry. 

That’s how he operates. 

He’s one of the slickest, slyest politicians, with that sly socialist smile that you’ll ever see. 

The difference is that these other communities that came here—their ethnic pride, their ethnic identities, or their national identities—were incidental, not essential, to being American. They were essentially Americans. 

They would have never taken a flag of Ireland or Italy and waved it while burning an American flag, like we see with the ICE demonstrations in Los Angeles. 

They would have never rooted against the American team because a visiting team from Ireland or Italy was playing. They would have never rooted against the American team and championed their former country, like we see with every soccer match that comes to the LA Coliseum. 

Jack Fowler: Yeah. 

Victor Davis Hanson: So that’s the difference. 

Jack Fowler: You know, Charlie Gasparino—I’m friends with Charlie. He’s a business columnist and writer for the New York Post, and I think folks see him on Fox every once in a while. He has a piece in the New York Post, maybe yesterday or today. 

Charlie’s an Italian American from the Bronx, like me. He points out these were not victim cultures. The Italians never played the victim card. The Irish didn’t either. 

And of course, I didn’t mention at the beginning that New York City had one of the largest—if not the largest—Jewish populations outside of Israel, over a million people. Where’s Little Israel on this map?  

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah. 

Another thing I really resent when you bring that up is that in the Mamdani-Obama-AOC line of thinking, there was all this prejudice against people only because of their color, and this was supposedly unique. 

No, no. There was prejudice—maybe not based on color—but based on language and stereotypes, as there always is with a majority culture. 

This country was a majority English-speaking nation up until about 1840. The first big wave was the Irish Potato Famine, and then almost simultaneously came the Germans. 

You could make the argument that by 1860 the largest minority in the United States was German-speaking, and that remained true until almost 1900. 

Lincoln was asked why he had a couple of German-speaking generals with German names, and he said, “I have to because the German constituency wants some representation as generals.” 

My point is there was an enormous amount of prejudice. 

There were op-eds that literally asked, “Are the Irish human?” Remember those? They said the Irish were small, they supposedly, like I have, had monkey eyes or strangely shaped heads, and they were tiny people, and there was a lot of discrimination. 

Then, as you know better than I do, the presidential slogan, “We’re against Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” 

Jack Fowler: Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion, yeah. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. The idea was that we let in all these people that are Catholics, and they were anarchists and drunks. 

The Italians dealt with the stereotype that every Italian was a criminal or from Sicily—a mafioso. 

So there was a lot of prejudice. 

Yet these people came long before the latest waves of immigration. They came, in relative terms, prior to 1965—in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s—they were much poorer in material terms. They had nothing. 

Today’s immigrant comes with a cell phone, sneakers, and a whole basket of entitlements. 

Forty-five percent of the U.S. budget is spent on some type of welfare assistance. 

There was none of that then. None. 

So I think we have to remember that this country was built by immigrants—but it’s not just the immigrants on Mamdani’s map. 

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