This essay is part of a series in which writers reflect on Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration as the mayor of New York City. 

Come January, New York City will be led by an immigrant—and, in a series of firsts, by a Muslim Indian American from Uganda. This kind of representation is meaningful in and of itself for many New Yorkers who hail from elsewhere, “especially when immigrant communities are being grabbed off the streets,” as Ana María Archila of the Working Families Party toldTheNew York Times. Muslims in the city watched with a particular “giddy optimism,” as Meher Ahmad summarized her own feelings in the Times, as well as a degree of apprehension about the backlash that might follow.

But as the new mayor takes office, the bigger question is not what he symbolizes for immigrant communities but what benefits he might deliver for them if he can realize his vision of an affordable city. Immigrants are more likely than other New Yorkers to be rent burdened and make up over half of the city’s bus ridership; Mamdani’s plans could enable families to remain in apartments from which they would otherwise have been priced out, and make it easier for low-income people to traverse the city they have come to see as home.

Mamdani has also underlined his commitment to protecting those immigrants most at risk from federal raids: while it made for absurd viewing, his November meeting with Trump may have at least temporarily spared New York the kind of full-fledged immigration enforcement blitz that D.C., Los Angeles, and Chicago have experienced. Mamdani’s chief of staff told the press after the White House meeting that the incoming mayor “made clear that we uphold sanctuary laws in our city”; his office recently released a “know your rights” video urging ordinary New Yorkers to “stand up to” federal agents grabbing people to deport. Even more significantly, his campaign promised it would strengthen existing sanctuary laws—which at present restrict police from certain forms of involvement with ICE—and review how the city shares residents’ personal data with federal agencies. His plan to strengthen oversight over the NYPD will be crucial to this effort: a recent probe found an instance in which an officer in the department violated local sanctuary laws.

Yet immigrants, of course, are not a monolith. They have taken different paths to America and had different experiences upon arrival—and they tell themselves different stories about their own luck and circumstance. Among South Asians, for instance, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Nepalis in the New York area are more likely than Indians to experience poverty. The disparities are stark within each subgroup. Indians who migrated after the 1965 immigration overhaul, and who benefited from the tech boom of the 1990s, are more likely to be high-caste, highly educated, and wealthy—making them very different from the Indians who have crossed the southern border in the last decade.

Alongside these diaspora-level divergences, varied personal conditions inform immigrant New Yorkers’ political views. Some are renters while others are homeowners and landlords; some own cars while others take the bus; some are undocumented while others have legal status; they are delivery workers, restaurant owners, food cart vendors, financiers, techies, organizers, and artists—and they make up a significant flank of the law enforcement agencies carrying out Trump’s deportation agenda. Even during the campaign, such splits were visible, with right-wing Hindus and many older Chinese Americans opposing Mamdani while other South and East Asians generally supported him. All this means that Mamdani’s policies may be unevenly received, among the city’s immigrant communities as much as any other. His rent freezes may aggravate mom-and-pop landlords; the promised expansion of street-vending licenses may alienate restaurant owners and already-licensed vendors; adding priority lanes for buses may frustrate car owners who care about parking.

It will be up to Mamdani to underscore the existence of common interests and bring some of his detractors into the fold. He demonstrated this skill during his campaign, charming wary real-estate power brokers and CEOs in meetings this fall. Just as importantly, though, it will be up to him to hold the line—to refuse to compromise on the values that carried him to victory, even if it ultimately means alienating an elite, influential wing of a given immigrant group.  

It’s possible that he could be the rare politician who succeeds. His campaign, after all, intentionally activated previously-overlooked, “low propensity” voters—for example, working-class South Asians, especially Bangladeshi Americans, who supported him not just by voting but by knocking on doors and phone banking. This base-building is already guaranteed to have implications beyond this election: having infrequently if ever been asked what they want, these immigrant groups are now primed to push the city’s political machinery, including the mayor himself, toward governance that acknowledges their needs, and by extension toward a truer democracy for the city as a whole.