ANALYSIS | How foreign-born socialists took over America’s two biggest cities

On Dec. 14, the two largest cities in the U.S. will be governed by foreign-born socialists, once Nithya Raman is sworn in as mayor of Los Angeles. Raman defeated incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, a nationally recognized Democrat, on Nov. 5, much like Ugandan-born DSA member and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani last year defeated former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a longtime Democrat who left the party to challenge Mamdani for Gracie Mansion.

How did both New York City (with an estimated population of roughly 8.58 million people) and Los Angeles (with an estimated population of roughly 3.87 million people) fall under the control of foreign-born socialists?

Certainly, crises like affordability, political polarization, and perhaps even discontent with U.S. involvement in geopolitics played a role, but the most crucial factor is mass immigration. The demographics — and with that, the electorate — of both Los Angeles and New York City have been fundamentally transformed by the past six decades of rampant immigration into what were once the most iconic and quintessentially American metropolitan titans in the country.

Building the Empire City

Originally settled by the Dutch and named New Amsterdam in 1626, the city known today as New York was captured by the British in 1664 and renamed in honor of James II, the Duke of York and the brother of King Charles II. After American forces won independence from the British crown in the Revolutionary War, New York City even served as the national capital for a time, from 1785 to 1790.

Today, the once-gleaming wonderland of towering skyscrapers and hanging steel and glass, the bustling hub of American industry and prowess, is a patchwork bazaar of foreign languages, foreign foods, and foreign customs, carved up and divided into ethnic enclaves like some conquered and partitioned territory. Mass immigration has gutted and hollowed out the city, and the foreign insurgents of the past six decades have cannibalized New York’s remains.

During the Revolutionary War, New York City was captured by the British and served as a command post for British forces, effectively halting what little immigration was flowing to the city across the Atlantic. The war diminished the prospect of success and prosperity in the New World for Europeans considering the arduous journey to the American colonies, but American Independence made New York City a center of trade and commerce and an attractive prospect for Europeans seeking to make their fortune.

Despite the success that newcomers might make for themselves in New York City, only about 35,000 crossed the Atlantic to settle there between the end of the war and 1820. All of those new arrivals were Europeans. Merchants and traders from England came to this burgeoning commercial hub, and British loyalists who had fled during the war returned home. Laborers and manual workers from Ireland and Scotland and farmers from Germany were also among the newcomers, along with some Dutch and French immigrants.

These new arrivals were largely compatible with the existing founding stock of the U.S. Predominantly former British subjects, the newfound nation also counted some Irish, French, Dutch, and Germans among its first citizens, even a few Poles and Spaniards.

The only real piece of legislation governing immigration to the U.S. at this point was the 1790 Naturalization Act, limiting who could apply for citizenship, followed in 1798 by the Alien and Sedition Acts, which allowed for the arrest and deportation of foreigners who were considered a threat to public safety. Immigration law, such as it was, was enforced haphazardly, chiefly through random checks by local authorities at the docks where ships would deposit newcomers.

Over the course of the next century, although immigration to New York City surged, the vast majority of newcomers were still nearly entirely of European origin, but even this presented a significant problem for federal and local authorities.

Starting in 1820, federal officials began keeping actual immigration records. New York City was the chief point of entry for new arrivals to the U.S. Between 1820 and 1880, as many as three million immigrants arrived in New York City. Two-thirds of these hailed from Ireland, where farmers, laborers, and families were fleeing British oppression and the Great Famine.

New York City opened a formal vetting center, called Castle Garden, where immigrants were inspected to ensure that they were not bringing diseases with them into the U.S., and the 1819 Steerage Act imposed regulations on ships carrying passengers in an effort to control the spread of disease. One of those regulations was the requirement of passenger manifests.

In addition to the Irish, new immigrants included hundreds of thousands of industrial workers from England and Scotland, nearly one million Germans, and a handful of Scandinavians and Italians. Many, especially the Germans, would not remain in New York City, but would head west thanks to the land promised to settlers by the 1862 Homestead Act.

The largest influx yet of immigrants into New York City — some 12 million new arrivals over a period of fewer than 45 years — would precipitate the first federal crackdown on immigration. Between 1880 and 1924, the population of New York City quintupled, thanks in large part to the 12 million immigrants who swarmed into the city from Italy, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Poland, Greece and Armenia. Few of the newest newcomers hailed from Britain, Ireland, or Germany.

In the wake of the massive surge in immigration, the U.S. implemented the Immigration Act of 1924, which effectively barred immigration from non-European countries and put an annual cap (165,000) on the number of European immigrants who could be accepted into the country. This policy would remain in place for roughly the next four decades, drastically curbing immigration and allowing time for those who did enter the U.S. to assimilate and adopt the heavily British-German-influenced culture and customs of their new home.

The Melting Pot that wouldn’t melt

Assimilation was a significant issue for immigrants in New York City. First founded by Dutch Protestants and expanded and later dominated by British Anglicans, anti-Catholic sentiment ran deep in the Empire City. When the Irish began arriving in the first half of the 19th century, they faced widespread discrimination and their Catholic faith was viewed with suspicion as an indicator of foreign allegiance. The Irish soon proved themselves invaluable, working hard and dangerous jobs for little pay, adopting American norms, and serving in the U.S. military, especially during the Civil War.

Italians were also slow to assimilate, particularly due to the organized crime networks that Italian immigrants from Sicily brought with them to the U.S. The Mafia quickly rose to dominate crime in New York City for nearly a century and spread across the country, becoming a national problem plaguing the Federal Bureau of Investigation for years. Yet the vast majority of Italian immigrants did manage to assimilate, eventually rising to prominent positions in business and even government and politics.

The next major wave of immigration to New York City, however, would prove far more resilient to assimilation and even incompatible with American society and culture.

Officially known as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and nicknamed the Hart-Celler Act — after authors Sen. Philip Hart, D-Mich., and Rep. Emanuel Celler, D-N.Y. — this crucial piece of legislation reversed nearly all of the caps and safeguards implemented in 1924 and rapidly liberalized and expanded immigration to the U.S.

Between 1924 and 1965, New York City received roughly 500,000 immigrant arrivals, a steep drop from the previous four decades. Between 1968, when the Hart-Celler Act took effect, and 2000, New York City received nearly five million immigrants.

In contrast to prior decades, very few of the Hart-Celler immigrants hailed from Europe, even from such “exotic” corners as Italy or Russia. More than 500,000 of the latest arrivals came from the Dominican Republic, about 400,000 from China, roughly 250,000 from Jamaica and Haiti, 200,000 from India, hundreds of thousands from Puerto Rico, and refugees from the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Those numbers only account for legal immigrants. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, made some three million illegal aliens into legal permanent residents almost overnight. More than 500,000 of those converted illegal aliens lived in New York City.

By 2000, New York City’s foreign-born population had soared to more than one third (36%). Over 170 different languages were spoken in the city, and immigrant groups carved out their own enclaves.

Washington Heights was transformed from a relatively small neighborhood of single-family homes to a chaotic mess of brownstone apartment buildings and townhouses populated by Dominican and Cuban newcomers. Chinatown expanded from a few blocks in 1965 to one of the largest Chinese communities in the world outside of China, eventually eroding much of Little Italy. Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi immigrants converted Jackson Heights into “Little India”; by 1990, the neighborhood was a multiethnic hodge-podge with no single ethnic majority.

Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, immigration continued to surge. Between 2000 and 2020, some three million foreign nationals settled in New York City, hailing not from the European stock that founded the U.S. but from Bangladesh, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Iraq, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Syria, and the global south.

As of 2024, the year before Mamdani was elected mayor, approximately 40% of New York City’s population was foreign-born. About half of that share are not U.S. citizens. Nearly two-thirds of children in New York City are born into households with at least one foreign-born parent.

Despite his quintessentially American button-down collar shirts and the European cut of his suits, Mamdani campaigned as a member of the global south. The Ugandan-born politician’s campaign logo was modeled on Bollywood imagery (his mother is an Indian filmmaker), his ads on television and social media were often multilingual, and his campaign signs and pamphlets were printed in dozens of languages.

Crucially, Mamdani focused campaign events on ethnic enclaves in the Empire City, particularly Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, and Muslim neighborhoods and locales. He managed to double turnout among Muslim voters compared to 2021’s mayoral election. Ultimately, the only ethnic demographic not to vote for Mamdani by a majority, according to exit polls, was white New York City voters. Additionally, only 43% of Protestants, 33% of Catholics, and 32% of Jews voted for Mamdani, while those of “other” religions, such as Islam and Hinduism, voted for him by over 70%.

Mamdani seemingly acknowledged this fact in his Nov. 4, 2025, victory speech, thanking “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties” for their support.

“New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant,” he declared.

The demographic transformation of New York City by mass immigration — particularly from the global south — radically altered the city’s electorate and catapulted a foreign-born Muslim socialist into the mayor’s mansion. Much the same happened in Los Angeles.

The fall of the City of Angels

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Los Angeles was a city of dreams, even if it hid a few nightmares. Home to Hollywood, movie stars, music icons, and political movers and shakers — not to mention its fair share of progressive intelligentsia, scientific pioneers, and business magnates — Los Angeles was a powerhouse of innovation, creativity, and wealth, the west coast’s mirror image of New York City.

Today, the second-largest city in the U.S. is known for its increasingly left-wing politics, crime and homelessness epidemics, and sprawling immigrant population. It was not always thus.

Los Angeles is not as old an American city as New York. Founded in 1781 by Spanish governor Felipe de Neve, Los Angeles became part of the Mexican Empire in 1821 before being purchased, along with the rest of California, by the U.S. in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 at the end of the Mexican-American War.

Early on, Los Angeles was far from the sprawling metropolis that it is today. At a time when the population of New York City was more than 500,000, the population of Los Angeles as a new American acquisition was just over 1,610, according to the 1850 census. The majority of early Los Angeles denizens were Americans, chiefly prospectors and gold miners, although there were a few hundred Sonoran Mexicans and Chinese railroad workers.

By the end of the 20th century, the population of Los Angeles had burgeoned to more than 100,000, of which nearly 20% was foreign-born. Most (21.7%) of the foreign-born population were German, while others included British (18%), Chinese (14.4%), Canadian (11%), and Irish (10%), along with some French, Mexican, Italian, Swedish, and Swiss nationals.

As Los Angeles became more developed, its population likewise expanded, approaching nearly 600,000 by 1920. The foreign-born population, however, remained relatively stable, rising to just over 21% as the city’s population overall roughly quintupled over the prior two decades. An industrial and agricultural boom ensured that the largest share (roughly 20%) of the foreign-born population was Mexican, a boom facilitated by labor deals negotiated with nearby Mexico.

The 1924 Immigration Act saw steep declines in the foreign-born populations from Europe and Asia, but labor deals with Mexico still brought thousands of Mexican nationals into the city for work. The Great Depression changed that.

Deportations increased under Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, but pressure from U.S.-born locals and laborers was more effective in driving self-deportations. Between 1920 and 1930, the foreign-born population in Los Angeles shrank by roughly 5%, even as the city’s population grew by about 250,000 in the same period.

As the U.S. returned to economic prosperity and dominance following World War II, labor deals with Mexico were revived, but with the requirement that laborers return to their home country at the end of each. The foreign-born population in Los Angeles hovered around 13% until 1960.

The Hart-Celler Act facilitated the first growth in the foreign-born population in Los Angeles in decades, a nearly 3% increase by 1970, two years after the legislation went into effect. By 1990, the city’s foreign-born population was approaching 40%.

Mexican nationals accounted for roughly 40% of the foreign-born population from the 1970s onward, while immigrants from other Latin American countries surged into Los Angeles in the 1980s, establishing criminal gangs and terrorist organizations like Mara Salvatrucha, commonly known as MS-13. Other immigrants accounting for much of the influx of the latter half of the 20th century included Chinese, Filipinos, Indians, Iranians, Koreans, and Vietnamese.

As of 2024, roughly one-third of the legal population of Los Angeles is foreign-born. The illegal population may bring the foreign-born total above the 50% mark. After the U.S.-Mexico labor program was terminated in 1964, Mexican nationals found illegally working in the U.S. were deported. The travel and patronage networks that they used, however, were never dismantled, facilitating quick travel for quick money. Although nearly one million were deported, most returned.

In the 1970s, Los Angeles adopted sanctuary policies barring local authorities from investigating or reporting the legal status of foreign nationals, attracting hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens to the City of Angels. Several years later, Reagan’s 1986 amnesty legalized roughly 720,000 illegal aliens living in Los Angeles.

Less than one decade later, in 1994, California voters overwhelmingly backed Proposition 187, unsubtly named the Save Our State (SOS) Referendum. The ballot measure barred illegal aliens from accessing public benefits and taxpayer-funded services. Federal District Judge Mariana Pfaelzer ruled that the law’s provisions were unconstitutional, reasoning that immigration enforcement is the purview of the federal government, not a state’s government. The ruling signaled that California — and sanctuary city Los Angeles in particular — could be considered a safe haven for illegal aliens.

Like Mamdani, Raman and her mayoral campaign appealed broadly to immigrant and foreign-born communities, campaigning heavily on pro-immigration policies.

“I’m an immigrant. This country and this city gave my family a future. It should do the same for everyone,” Raman said at a No Kings protest in March, characterizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as a secret police force “kidnapping our neighbors and tearing families apart.”

Raman’s “Immigrants in, ICE out” platform included proposals prohibiting the city from cooperating or working with ICE and other federal immigration enforcement agencies, appointing a police chief who would not hand over arrested illegal aliens to ICE, using local taxpayer funds to pay for lawyers for illegal aliens facing removal proceedings, and creating a city-wide ID for illegal aliens to use to access taxpayer-funded benefits. She also ran on her record as the author of Los Angeles’ sanctuary laws.

The new American voter

The mass immigration unleashed on the U.S. over the latter third of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st century has fundamentally reshaped the American electorate. Hispanic, Asian, African, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern immigrants overwhelmingly vote as ethnic blocs, often based on shared ethnic interests.

According to multiple studies, Hispanic immigrants tend to favor political candidates who pledge immigration liberalization and anti-discrimination policies, voting for such candidates anywhere from 60% to 75% of the time. One study examining voting data from 2000 to 2016 concluded that Hispanic immigrants vote cohesively for Democrats due to “shared ethnic cues,” with turnout and bloc strength increasing in areas with high immigrant density. Cuban immigrants are the only Latin American immigrant voting bloc that tends to vote for Republicans.

Asian voters also typically vote as a series of blocs, although some Asian voter blocs — namely, Vietnamese — skew consistently Republican. According to the 2020 Asian American Voter Survey, Chinese, Indian, Filipino, and other Asian voters largely support Democrats, citing immigration and anti-discrimination policies as motivating factors, in addition to influence from ethnic social networks.

Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Middle Eastern immigrants also organized as a cohesive voting bloc, overwhelmingly supporting Democratic candidates and politicians, largely on the basis of pro-immigration policies. Again, there are some outliers: Iranian immigrants are less inclined than the majority of Middle Eastern immigrants to vote for Democrats.

High-density concentrations of immigrants — such as those found in New York City and Los Angeles — amplify ethnic voting bloc trends. A 2004 Migration Policy Institute report found that first-generation immigrants almost always vote ethnically, while the trend tends to weaken over successive generations. The weakening of that trend can be delayed or even halted altogether by concentrating second- and third-generation immigrants in the same ethnic-based communities as their parents.

The reason that the two largest cities in the U.S. voted to elect foreign-born socialists as mayor is directly correlated to the high number and density of immigrants concentrated in New York City and Los Angeles — and those election results could easily be replicated across much of the country without stringent immigration enforcement.