Zohran Mamdani’s stunning win in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor signals a seismic shift in US politics. The victory of the Ugandan-Indian American state assemblyman confirms what has been quietly building for years: A new working-class immigrant politics, rooted in organising, solidarity, and a sharp critique of inequality, is taking hold within the Democratic Party. Mamdani’s campaign – focused on rent freezes, universal childcare, public transit, and green infrastructure – galvanised multiracial working-class coalitions across the city. His win is a repudiation of corporate influence and local corruption, and a powerful endorsement of politics shaped by immigrants with deep ties to global struggles for justice.
This movement is not limited to New York. In Congress, Ilhan Omar – refugee, former security guard, and daughter of Somali immigrants – has helped define this new left. Joining her is Rashida Tlaib, the first and only Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress. Tlaib, Omar and Mamdani represent a politics shaped not just by US inequality, but by personal or ancestral experiences of instability, austerity, and repression in the Global South. They have emerged as the public faces of a broader trend: Politicians from immigrant backgrounds forming the backbone of an ascendant, insurgent Democratic Left.
That’s not the version of immigration Donald Trump has in mind.
In October 2019, then-President Trump addressed a campaign rally in Minneapolis – a city with a large Somali population, represented by Ilhan Omar. Drawing on familiar right-wing tropes, Trump warned that immigrants and refugees were changing the United States for the worse. The subtext was clear: This was a dog whistle to MAGA voters, particularly white working- and middle-class Americans who blamed immigration for the country’s decline. This rhetoric previewed what is now commonplace – unlawful, often brutal deportations of thousands from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In Trump’s telling, immigration from “shithole” countries was responsible for crime, economic stagnation, and the misuse of public benefits. What he didn’t say was that many Somali immigrants in Minneapolis had fled violence – some of it triggered or worsened by US foreign policy.
But Trump was at least partly right: migrants and their offspring are changing US political life – just not in the way he feared.
In fact, just a year before Trump’s speech, the outskirts of Minneapolis were the site of the first worker strikes against Amazon’s exploitative labour practices. Led mainly by Somali immigrants, these actions helped catalyse a renewed national labour movement. What began in one warehouse soon spread, with other Amazon plants and industries following suit.
This is what makes Mamdani’s mayoral primary win so significant. Alongside figures like Omar, he exemplifies a new kind of leadership – grounded in lived experience, powered by grassroots organising, and capable of translating complex policy into plainspoken demands for justice. His campaign focused on economic dignity, tenant rights, childcare, climate resilience, and taxing the rich – all anchored in the real conditions of working-class life.
Just take African immigrants, where Mamdani and Omar have roots: There are now roughly 2.1 million sub-Saharan African immigrants living in the US, making up about 5 percent of the total foreign-born population. Much coverage emphasises how well-educated or professionally successful African immigrants are – facts often highlighted by middle- and upper-class diasporas. But these narratives obscure the reality for most: Lower average incomes, more precarious work, and higher poverty rates than other immigrant groups.
Yet it is from this working-class base that a new politics is emerging – one with the potential to reshape the Democratic Party from the ground up.
As the founder of the website Africa Is a Country, I spent nearly a decade and a half tracing how Africans are reinventing democratic politics despite the pressures of neoliberalism, authoritarianism, and militarism. From Nigeria’s EndSARS and Uganda’s Walk to Work to the Arab Spring and South Africa’s Fees Must Fall, African activists have offered bold critiques of injustice. These movements have also influenced global struggles – most clearly in the resonance between them and Black Lives Matter.
Many African immigrants in the US draw on these traditions of resistance. Mamdani organised alongside New York City taxi drivers fighting debt. Omar has cleaned offices and worked on assembly lines. Both have built political careers by listening to, and organising with, communities pushed to the margins.
In a nation still reeling from Trump-era xenophobia and inequality, these new leaders offer a hopeful alternative. They are building solidarity across divides – between immigrants and the native-born, Muslims and non-Muslims, Black Americans and new African arrivals, and the second-generation offspring of migrants from elsewhere – grounded not in assimilation, but in shared struggle.
As political theorist Corey Robin recently noted on social media, Mamdani is a “happy warrior” in the mould of Franklin Roosevelt: Sharp, grounded, and unafraid to engage in real debate. That he is Muslim and South Asian deepens his significance in a city and nation transformed by global migration. He represents a radically democratic future – one conservatives can neither contain nor comprehend.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
