After Zohran Mamdani cruised to victory in New York City’s mayoral election last November, Republican politicians and right-wing pundits rapidly coalesced around a shared narrative to make sense of the candidate’s historic ascent. Unwilling to concede that Mamdani’s left-wing politics might command genuine populist appeal among American voters, right-wing critics instead reached for their favorite scapegoat: immigrants.

Across the MAGAsphere politicians and pundits sought to delegitimize Mamdani’s victory as the result of a foreign “invasion.” “Legal immigrants who hate America elected a Communist Muslim Jihadist,” proclaimed the ultrazionist congressman Randy Fine, who warned that America was next “if we don’t stop it” (by it, of course, he meant non-white immigration). Others insisted that this was simply all part of the plan to destroy America. As the podcaster and self-proclaimed “theocratic fascist” Matt Walsh explained to his four million followers on X: a “third-world communist won in New York because New York is a third-world city now,” which was “mass migration working exactly as intended.”

The country’s most inveterate xenophobe, Stephen Miller, affirmed this script by simply posting a screenshot from a 2023 report showing that half of New York households contain at least one immigrant. After Mamdani won the Democratic primary in June, the White House official blamed “unchecked migration” for “fundamentally [remaking] the NYC electorate,” hence enabling the rise of a democratic socialist in the city. “Import communists, become communists,” declared Miller.