00:00Immigrants made homes here in New York City, and they helped to make New York City.
00:04That legacy of every generation of Americans insisting that the right to life, liberty,
00:10and the pursuit of happiness extends to them too, is no relic of the past.
00:14It carried millions of black Americans north during the Great Migration.
00:18It drew hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans to New York City after the Second World War.
00:23It invited countless others from the West Indies and South Asia and West Africa and across the world.
00:27And it is what brought my family to the city when I was seven years old.
00:31Hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants arrived with stomachs aching from a famine manufactured by imperial cruelty.
00:37Chinese sailors settled in what is today Chinatown.
00:40Millions more traveled under the Statue of Liberty and through Ellis Island.
00:44Jewish people escaping pogroms.
00:46Italians fleeing poverty.
00:48Syrians seeking economic opportunity.
00:50Each of these new arrivals peered through portholes onto a city that was changing as fast as the nation.
00:56As we mark 250 years.
00:59What do we see?
01:00We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions.
01:05We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world.
01:08One where children go to sleep hungry while the world's first trillionaire hungers for more.
01:13We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections.
01:19We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked
01:27vans.
01:27We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands,
01:33those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone.
01:37And we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft
01:42hands of a precious few.
