Immigrants should learn to love America… and so should we!

This summer, our beleaguered big screens will welcome the return of America’s most famous illegal alien: Superman. This much needed reboot comes as President Trump, who earned my vocal support, is rebooting our country’s immigration policy and culture more broadly. 

The changing story of our first superhero offers a mythological mirror on the challenges we’re confronting as a nation, from without and within. What should it mean to be and become an American? How do we see ourselves, as heroic or villainous? And how might we forge a new way forward? I have a few ideas plucked straight from the political forbidden zone. 

Post-Truth, Social Justice, and the Anti-American Way 

Baby Clark Kent crash-landed in America during our last major wave of immigration in the 1920s and 30s. And like so many new Americans, including my own Italian great-grandparents, he embraced his new home with gusto, coming to our defense against the Nazis and then the Communists. His motto reflects our highest values: Truth, Justice, and the American Way… at least it used to. 

U.S IMMIGRATION WEBSITE STOPS ACCEPTING APPLICANTS FOR BIDEN PROGRAM IN TRUMP CRACKDOWN

The last part of our famous Kryptonian-American’s super-slogan, "the American Way," fell out of favor in recent decades with the rise of anti-heroism and so-called "critical social justice." Academia, entertainment, and the news media made it their full-time jobs for decades to portray America and our history as the world’s greatest supervillain.

Every aspect of American culture has been under siege. Our kids are now taught that our real birth as a nation wasn’t 1776 with the Declaration of Independence, but 1619 with the arrival of the first slaves in an effort to portray a previously universal, and despicable, practice as uniquely American. So much for "truth".

Having defeated the Nazis and the Soviets in wars both hot and cold, most on the left and even some on the right now see the US as a too-often belligerent force on the world stage. Even Superman himself, in Frank Miller’s bold and bleak 1986 graphic novels, was reduced to a cynical super-weapon of the military industrial complex, destined for defeat by the Dark Knight. Justice died in darkness too. 

Our world-leading economic growth is decried as a scourge on the planet, producing a "climate crisis" that threatens to extinguish all mankind. Make that personkind, since the basic definitions of man and woman have come under assault, and with them, our kids mental health and future fertility much to the convenient satisfaction of those same climate alarmists. 

And finally, pulling a page from the 2000 Superman comics, we’re told that Donald Trump is our real life Lex Luthor, a corrupt billionaire fascist supervillain turned-president. 

It should come as no surprise that poll after poll has found that patriotism, especially among young Americans, has completely collapsed. Axios found that only 18% of 18-34-year-olds are "extremely proud" to be American. That’s down from 85% in 2013 before the woke reign of terror ramped up. A 67% drop! That same timeframe has also seen a complete collapse in perceived race relations in America, for similar, and similarly fraudulent reasons.

One of the ironies of our modern era is that as our elite has poisoned our patriotism at home, we’ve also seen more people flood INTO this country from abroad than ever before in our history! While blue-haired banshees on TikTok and silly "studies" professors bash America at every turn, millions of poor and huddled masses, (mostly) yearning to be free, have flooded into our alleged hell-hole. It’s a stark reminder that while we’re building a wall to keep people out, actually hellish countries wrecked by communism and its various "progressive" cousins have historically had to build walls to keep their own people IN.

And so, here we are as Americans, just like Superman at the start of his newest big screen trailer: face-down in the snow, beaten, and bloodied.

A Dark Night for America

"Make America Great Again" resonates with voters because so many Americans believe that our country is no longer great. Too many think we never were. Let’s be clear: our country DOES face a flood of very real problems, each one is impacted by immigration, though the outcomes are subject to good-faith disagreement. 

Last fall, I quixotically released a Hamilton-style musical, Battle of the Borders, that brought all of these issues on both sides and more to life with the production value of a summer superhero blockbuster. In working through the details of the immigration debate, I found my own views shifting, though I remain more pro-immigration than many of my fellow Trumpian travelers. 

Millions of working-age men have left the labor force even as some measures suggest that a majority of new jobs have gone to immigrants. Yet many (maybe most) economists agree that immigration is a net contributor to growth and a powerful tool for countering inflation. 

Crime is up across the country, yet some statistics suggest that immigrants, including illegals, commit less crime than native-born citizens. That’s cold comfort to the victims of violent illegal gang violence. And how much should anyone trust these government statistics in the first place, given recent FBI revisionism? 

Our opioid epidemic is a humanitarian disaster destroying millions of lives and flooding our streets with the desperate and homeless. But a big beautiful wall on our southern border won’t change the demand-side of the equation. Plus, our nation’s history of alcohol prohibition has lessons we shouldn’t be so quick to forget. 

Meanwhile, cities across the country have seen their schools, hospitals, and shelters pushed beyond capacity by the Biden-era wave of illegal mass migration. Remember, our last big wave of immigration, when Kal-El first arrived in Kansas, took place before the dawn of the progressive welfare state.

When even the Democrat mayor of Gotham City, Eric Adams, is warning that migrants will destroy the city, we should probably take notice. 

Our Complicated Culture Matters Most

None of the immigration-related issues we face cut as deep for the future of America as our changing culture, which as Andrew Breitbard noted is upstream of politics and policy. And this is where my friends on the right proclaiming "culture matters" need to clarify: which culture? 

Buchanan-style populists like to point to our white, Western European history as a guide for our future. But that Europe is a distant memory. A look at the beliefs of our mostly-white, politically engaged elite should give every patriot serious pause. I’m afraid the W in WASP now stands for "woke". 

Consider that it mostly wasn’t Latin American immigrants who tore down statues of Abraham Lincoln during the BLM riots in 2020 or dressed a George Washington statue up as a Hamas fighter in 2023. Those were our native-born and bred, college-indoctrinated kids who did that! While they were burning American cities after their Starbucks shifts, 55% of Latino men were busy voting to re-elect Mr. MAGA himself.

Mindset matters more than skin color or country of origin. 

Put bluntly, I’d gladly welcome two hard-working new Americans from Mexico in exchange for every one native-born America-hating gender studies graduate from Harvard. I’ll welcome ten more graduates from Guatemala’s Universidad Francisco Marroquín before considering a single censorious, terror-sympathetic Oxford Anglo. 

My point here is simple. We shouldn’t expect newcomers to assimilate into America and WANT to be American… if our native culture despises our country! The woke warriors have told us and our kids that we should hate America. Their nihilistic cries for "land back" and "reparations" might as well say: come on in and strip us for parts! We deserve it! 

What a self-defeating mantra for newcomers to embrace! If that is our "way", we won’t be a country for much longer. Luckily, that tide is finally turning, if slowly.

A New American Way on Immigration 

Most people, including President Trump, believe we need continued immigration into America. Immigration in general has historically been good for our country and still can be. But the past four years of black market open borders through willfully neglecting the law was never tenable or just. 

Biden and Harris encouraged millions of people to skip the line, come to America through the back door, and remain in the shadows with an unstable and uncertain future. And they’ve let thousands of seriously "bad hombres" in along the way. That’s a supervillain move if I’ve ever seen one, complete with Joker-style laughter.

Protecting our citizens and sovereignty is the most basic function of government. I support President Trump’s efforts to restore the rule of law at our borders. I also hope that success in that effort will lay the foundation for a more honest debate over the legal path for future American immigrants. That will involve making political compromises in an era of polarization. 

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So here’s a potential policy compromise to consider: let’s prioritize more and easier permanent legal residency and in exchange, tightly restrict full citizenship and voting rights to natural-born Americans alone, along with universal voter ID like every other major civilized nation with same day vote counts. 

While restricting the franchise to natural-born citizens may be political Kryptonite, it would help depoliticize immigration by eliminating migrants as a voting bloc up for grabs. No more Tammany hall style vote-buying by left-wingers or reactionary right-wing restrictions for fear of an imported electorate! And besides, why should any newcomer get to change the rules of the game they just joined? If you don’t like our rules, don’t come to play.

One thing is crystal clear: the immigration debate is fundamentally a debate about the future of American culture. Who are we, as a nation? Which values should we cherish, promote, and expect newcomers to assimilate in to? What is "The American Way"? We shouldn’t just drop that from our super slogan. We need it and need it well-defined. 

We don’t need to reinvent this wheel. America’s creed is the best of Western Civilization: Freedom. Individual responsibility. Religious liberty, rooted in Judeo-Christian values. Opportunity. Identity-blind equality under the law. Local authority. Voluntary association. 

This is what Truth, Justice, and the American Way means to me. This is what newcomers should be expected to embrace. And here’s hoping that, like Superman, it’s about to make a comeback.