When did New York City trade its identity as a true melting pot for an empty pan of selective narratives? That question arose on July 9 when the City released its “Immigrant Enclaves” map.
Enclaves such as Little Italy, Arthur Avenue, Gaelic Park, Borough Park, and countless others are essential threads in the story of New York. They help us understand the arrival, struggles, and contributions of successive waves of immigrants — how they settled, built communities, and gradually integrated into the larger American fabric. These places are living chapters of our shared history.
Yet, the city’s map spotlights some communities while erasing others that helped build this city: the Italians of Little Italy and Arthur Avenue, the Irish of Gaelic Park and Little Ireland, the vibrant Jewish-American community in Borough Park, Staten Island — the most Italian county in the United States — along with thriving groups from Albania, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and many others. This includes Puerto Rican Americans, who, like so many other groups, left their island for the mainland in pursuit of greater opportunity.
MAYOR MAMDANI, WHY DID YOU ERASE LITTLE ITALY?
This was no innocent oversight. When we begin to pick and choose which groups deserve recognition, we stir the melting pot of division. Instead of celebrating the full, rich history of all who helped shape New York, we segment individuals into favored and forgotten classes, and whenever we do that, we do more harm than good. We replace shared stories of striving with grievance hierarchies. We turn neighbors into categories and diminish the very people whose hard work, family values, and faith created modern New York.
America’s greatness has never come from dividing people. It comes from welcoming individuals, wherever they come from, and offering them something unparalleled: a society where personal effort, merit, and opportunity can lift anyone willing to seize them. My own Irish and Italian ancestors arrived with little but found a place that rewarded grit and determination.
That same chance has been extended to millions from every corner of the globe. When people reach America, they step into a land like no other, one filled with real pathways to succeed through education, entrepreneurship, work, and community.
The pattern we see today is troubling. What begins as rhetoric about justice and inclusion too often hardens into tools of exclusion and erasure. High-achieving students are penalized by group identity. Traditional communities and working families are sidelined. Dissenters from the prevailing orthodoxy are labeled enemies. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” rhetoric slides into deliberate division, undermining the social trust and shared culture that allow individuals to thrive.
The results are visible: strained resources, eroded cohesion, and policies that make it harder for people to get ahead. By focusing on groups over individuals, we weaken the very system, rooted in individual rights, capitalism, and the rule of law, that enabled generation after generation of newcomers to rise.
We reject this empty-pan approach. New York and America were built by individuals from countless backgrounds who came together as one people. E pluribus unum — out of many, one — is not an empty slogan. It is the formula that delivered opportunity and greatness. Italians, Irish, Jews, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Albanians, Filipinos, Sri Lankans, and every other group succeeded not by clinging to grievance or engineered separation, but through hard work, strong families, and faith in the American promise.
Our history is one of resilience and aspiration. Our future remains bright when we treat people as individuals with dignity and potential, regardless of where they came from. Let us honor honest history, celebrate individual merit, and recommit to the melting pot ideal that actually works.
MAMDANI’S MAP ERASES THE IMMIGRANT AMERICAN DREAM
Wherever people arrive from, America remains the place that offers them the extraordinary chance to succeed on their own terms.
That is the positive agenda worth defending: not division into classes, but opportunity for every person who embraces the principles that make this nation exceptional.
Vito J. Fossella is the Staten Island Borough president.