New York is the city of new arrivals. Historically, it’s a legal and cultural sanctuary. This city’s identity is inseparable from immigration and its architectural multiculturalism sets it apart from any other city in the world.
The Census Bureau released data covering the end of July 2025, showing that international arrivals to New York City have fallen 70 percent in a single year, from 220,000 people to 66,000. Brookings senior fellow William H. Frey analyzed the data and found that New York’s metro population growth dropped from 291,111 to 32,361 in that same period –– the largest decline of any major metro area in the country. Four of the five NYC boroughs nationally ranked among the top ten counties had the steepest drops in new international residents. Queens and Brooklyn, the neighborhoods that rebuilt this city after the 1970s fiscal crisis and carried it through the pandemic, took the hardest hits. Frey calls last year’s figures the “tip of the iceberg.” The Census Bureau projects net immigration could fall to 321,000 nationally by June 2026, down from 1.3 million the year before.
These numbers serve as warning of a structural reversal.
And not just in numbers, but also proposals. Last week, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas introduced what he is calling the Mamdani Act, or the Measures Against Marxism’s Dangerous Adherents and Noxious Islamists Act. It would strip courts of any authority to review these determinations, making deportation and denaturalization decisions administratively final. With no appeal and no judicial check.
The bill is named after New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani — born in Uganda, raised in the United States, naturalized in 2018, and elected by this city’s voters last year. Roy has called him “a self-proclaimed socialist, pro-Islamist, and naturalized U.S. citizen from Uganda,” arguing that Mamdani’s presence in office proves the immigration system enables hostile ideology. Mamdani went through every channel American law provides and still ended up the named target of a congressional bill, with no court available to weigh in if it passed. The bill’s conflation of democratic socialism with authoritarian communism is so broad it reads as either deliberate bad faith or genuine ignorance, and either way the joke is on the people it targets.
None of this touches what immigrants actually are to the city. Between 2014 and 2024, Brookings found that metro areas with larger increases in their foreign-born working-age populations saw stronger growth in gross metro product and employment. CUNY professor John Mollenkopf described immigrants as “vital to the resilience of the city,” pointing to younger workers filling essential roles and caring for a rapidly aging population.
Without sustained immigration, economist David Kallick warns, the city will shrink. New York has a strong economy right now, which buys some time, but Kallick is explicit that a sustained drop in arrivals leads to population decline regardless of economic conditions. He pointed to the 1970s as the relevant precedent, which saw New York lose over 800,000 residents and enter a fiscal crisis that required a federal bailout and gutted public services for a generation. The city that came out the other side was smaller and poorer, and it took decades to recover. Immigration was central to the rebuilding. It is worth asking what the rebuilding looks like if the people who did it are no longer coming.
The census data and the Mamdani Act are products of the same political moment. The numbers show what consistent hostility does to arrival. The legislation shows what Congress wants to do about those who have already arrived. Together they describe something worth being clear-eyed about: a city that has always defined itself by who it lets in is watching that definition become contested in the streets and in the statute books — at the same time.
The Zeitgeist aims to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented are solely those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial board
