Superman and the Case for Open Borders

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Content warning: Discussions of government abduction and imprisonment, hazardous conditions for migrants, genocide, and discussion of racist and Nazi rhetoric. Discretion is advised. Also spoilers aplenty for Superman (2025).

In July of last year, director James Gunn gave an interview where he said, “Superman is the story of America. An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country, but for me it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.”

Not long ago, this might’ve been a pretty anodyne statement from someone in a country famed for being a “nation of immigrants”. But of course, things have shifted so radically that we now have a presidential administration blaming the rise in hamburger prices on an entirely unfounded claim of immigrants bringing sick cows over the border and the national convention for his re-election featuring signs emblazoned with the words “MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW” just in case anyone was confused about what they wanted to do. And so, astoundingly, someone pointing out that Superman is an immigrant feels like a radical political statement.

Cue the right wing media firestorm. On Fox News, Kellyanne Conway said, “We don’t go to the movie theaters to be lectured to and to have somebody throw their ideology onto us,” leading host Jesse Waters to joke, “You know what it says on his cape? MS-13.” Referring to the notorious Mexican criminal organization, while the chyron read “Superwoke”. Representative Burgess Owens, meanwhile, called it “anti-American propaganda”.

Now, I’ll forgive you if you’ve already forgotten this particular manufactured brew-ha-ha in an exhausting and never-ending news cycle of outrages and counter-outrages. As a story, Superman the immigrant already seems like it was a lifetime ago. But the question of immigration is as pressing as ever as Trump’s army of masked goons continues to disappear our friends and neighbors off the streets for the crime of wanting to live here or execute innocent civilians with impunity. And it’s very easy for liberals to wag their fingers at this behavior but still stump for what they term “reasonable immigration law”. Right-wing media and politicians spent the Biden administration complaining about his “open borders policy”, while simultaneously Biden deported more people than Trump did in his first term, about 4.7 million people. Obama, meanwhile, deported 2.7 million people across two terms, which at that time was more than any president before him, and gained him the nickname “deporter in chief”.

And so if you actually care about the rights and lives of migrants, I think its worth trying to dig in here before another Democratic administration sweeps into power and a quieter, more friendly-faced deportation machine continues its dirty work.

The truth is, actual open borders are so far outside the Overton Window today that there isn’t a single political figure in the United States, major or minor, openly advocating for them. Instead our putatively left-wing party—along with center-left parties around the world—continually chase the right to show how hard they are on immigration, as if what people against immigration really want are half measures.

And yet, as I will argue, closed borders are historically new, wildly unethical, and economically disastrous and the nationalistic urge behind them is fundamentally rooted in racism and xenophobia and always has been. And Superman, both the character and the 2025 film, can help provide a lens as to why.

Superman was created in 1938 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, children of Jewish Eastern European immigrants. As I discussed in “Gravity’s Rainbow Over Palestine”, in the Russian Empire of the late 19th and early 20th century, Jews faced merciless persecution, state-sanctioned violence, and severe employment restrictions, condemning them to dire poverty. Meanwhile, the United States had a more or less open borders policy for everyone other than the Chinese (because racism) until 1924. Between 1880 and 1930, 28 million Europeans migrated to the United States, mostly from places suffering economic hardships like Ireland, Germany, Greece, and Southern Italy, as well as 1.5 million Russian Jews. In fact, from the year 1800 to 1900, three quarters of the all global immigration was to the United States.

Meanwhile, according to the book of Genesis, the Jewish Patriarch Jacob—also known as Israel—and his children fled to Egypt as refugees to avoid a famine. In the book of Exodus, a new Pharoah rises over Egypt who observes that these “children of Israel” or Israelites have multiplied greatly and says, per the King James translation, “Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we” and, feeling threatened, decides to enslave them. Then as they continue to multiply, he decides that all newborn Israelite boys should be drowned the Nile in order to thin their numbers. One of the Israelite women tries to save her baby by putting him in a basket and hiding him in bullrushes by the river. However, the boy is discovered by the Pharoah’s daughter, who adopts him as her own and names him Moses. Moses ultimately grows up to discover his origins and demand the freedom of his people.

It’s easy to see how Schuster and Siegel might be inspired both by their own family histories and the story from the Hebrew Bible, along with pulp heroes of the time such as Doc Savage, a paragon of human ability whose first name was Clark and who had a Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic, and notions current in contemporary science fiction of beings from planets with higher gravity than ours coming to our world and finding they had amazing strength and invulnerability. (Originally, Superman didn’t fly or shoot beams from his eyes, but he could leap tall buildings in a single bound.) That Superman is an immigrant and a refugee is essentially textual. From his very first appearance he’s sent as a baby by his parents from an exploding planet, like the Kindertransport rescue effort that brought 10,000 Jewish children to Britain from Nazi controlled territory (but not their parents who were left to be murdered) beginning in 1938, the same year Superman first appeared. The TV show Smallville (2001-2011) even has a plot point about Pa Kent forging his adoptive son’s birth papers, making him explicitly undocumented with fraudulent paperwork.

It’s worth focusing on this for a moment. Now, obviously one can’t really imagine Superman’s birth father, Jor-El, applying for his son’s legal entry into the country given the circumstances of the story. But, fundamentally, when someone comes to the United States as a refugee they’re generally by definition fleeing danger, immiseration, and death, just like the Kingertransport children or the 900 Jewish refugees on the MS St. Louis which landed in Cuba in 1939 and applied for refugee status there, in the US, and every other country they could think of only to be refused and sent back to Europe where many of them were murdered. Indeed, it’s perhaps not so hard to imagine a situation where the United States became so dangerous that we wanted to pick up our families and move to Canada, only to have the Canadians grab us off the street, stick us in ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ camps in horrific conditions, separate us from our children, and so on, before sending us and our families back to our fate. But then, of course, America doesn’t even need to become dangerous for someone to desperately want to leave, it could simply become a place where people are trapped into a poverty our economic conditions make impossible to escape. Hard to imagine, I know.

Which is all to say the moral case for open borders is easy to make. In fact, you can see just how morally bankrupt our current system is from the way those trying to reach our country are dehumanized. For example, in Arizona, in 2005, two people from a migrant aid group transported three migrants who had just crossed the border to a medical clinic because they were suffering from severe thirst, malnourishment, and had blisters on their feet so severe it was difficult to walk. For this act, they were arrested and faced up to 15 years in prison, though the charges were ultimately dismissed. Border patrol, meanwhile, routinely destroys food and water left for migrants. There are even reports of border patrol agents catching migrants on the border and forcing them to take their shoes off and run through uneven, thorny ground while the agents track them down for sport. In 2022 alone, the remains of nearly nine hundred migrants were found along the US-Mexico boarder. (The same year, 2,062 migrants died attempting to cross the Mediterranean.)

The point of all this wanton death and suffering? To prevent immigration.

But then, despite the ramping up of immigration enforcement and hardship, despite “build a wall” and everything that goes along with it, immigration both legal and illegal as continued to skyrocket. Much as alcohol prohibition only served to funnel money to organized crime, the hardened boarder has only made trafficking more expensive and therefore more lucrative both for cartels, coyotes, and corrupt state agents. It catches people who just want a better life for themselves and their family between those on our side who would harm them and those on the other side who would exploit them. And none of it makes sense if we didn’t see the lives of these people as fundamentally expendable, as something less human than ourselves.

In Superman (2025), this dehumanization is dramatized by the billionaire Lex Luthor literally saying about Superman “He’s not a man. He’s an it.” Luthor also funds a massive smear campaign against Superman like the right wing media troll farms employed by Vladimir Putin’s regime, except here the trolls are a hilariously a literal hoard of super-intelligent monkeys. Of course, as with the minority metaphor of mutants in the X-Man, the problem with superheroes as metaphors for oppressed minorities is that superheroes really are fantastically dangerous in a way regular humans simply aren’t. In the movie, for example, Hawkgirl single-handedly executes an unarmed world leader in violation of all sorts of national and international laws. Leaders of every country on Earth would be concerned about someone who could do that. (It’s bad enough when a foreign government does it.) When, at the end of the film, General Mori laments that the metahumans are now “the ones making the rules”, he has reason to be upset. Indeed, it’s always been my take that when the government during Captain America: Civil War want to register superhumans for safety, when one of those superhumans can bring down a building with a thought, the metaphor seems closer to gun control than human rights. It twists things in a way that actually reinforces the fears of people who think that minorities are dangerous.

And Trump and the media machine behind him love to play up the danger of immigrants, how they bring crime and drugs and (as he said in his first political speech) are rapists. But the reality is that immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than those born in America. A first-generation Mexican immigrant is 45% less likely to commit a violent offense than a third-generation American. A 2018 study determined that “increases in the undocumented immigrant population within states are associated with significant decreases in the prevalence of violence.” Thus open borders would actually mean less crime per capita. This perhaps isn’t surprising because immigrants sacrificed a lot more to be here than those who just happened to end up born here. Indeed, far from bringing criminality into the country, criminality is often specifically what they come here to escape. And so, if you want crime to go down in your neighborhood, have immigrants move there. The drugs that are claimed to be smuggled over aren’t brought by undocumented immigrants but by legal travelers, often citizens, through ports of call like airports, which also isn’t surprising since if you’re smuggling drugs you don’t want them caught because the person carrying them is undocumented. But as we explored last episode, truth isn’t a thing that matters to this particular administration which is happy to bandy about total fabrications about Haitians eating people’s pets at a presidential debate. And moreover for fascists, getting people to believe big lies is part of the point, because by getting people to believe big lies you reinforce your own power over them, which is far more important than anything so trivial as the truth.

But then if Trump was primarily concerned about criminal immigrants, than it would be immigrants who’d committed some other crime that he’d prioritize on removing, not ones who are simply living peaceful lives. But of course for the Trump administration, criminality is clearly just an excuse.

Other common arguments against open borders are similarly based on misconceptions and lies. Trump likes lying about undocumented immigrants being on welfare, but of course undocumented immigrants are not eligible for welfare and even new permanent residents (green card holders) have to wait 5 years before being able to draw from social services, while those on temporary visas are completely ineligible. In fact, undocumented immigrants pay into services like social security and medicare without being eligible for benefits, and even once they are eligible, far more is paid in than taken out ($96.7 billion in 2022). This is because an undocumented immigrant can still receive a taxpayer identification number from the IRS and thus have tax withholding on their incomes, while others use false or borrowed Social Security Numbers for their employment. In addition, of course, undocumented immigrants pay sales tax and property taxes and the like, or they pay rent, from which their landlords pay property taxes. Just by being here, immigrants contribute to taxes from which they receive far less benefit than citizens.

The idea that hoards of immigrants arrive here to become unproductive leaches on the state simply has no basis in reality.

The funny thing for me here, is that the most beloved left-wing figure in American politics, Senator Bernie Sanders, opposes open borders claiming that capitalists just want to import cheaper labor to bring down labor costs, which strangely is the same claim you see folks like JD Vance making. This is, after all, the “they’re stealing our jobs” narrative—immigration leads to lower wages as more workers compete for fewer jobs. Indeed, I strangely find myself referring here to work by folks like the Cato Institute and Thomas Sowell, who aren’t usually my kinds of thinkers and might surprise folks who, given the evidence, think of the right wing as universally anti-immigration. (As an aside, if you want an epic takedown of Sowell by someone who actually understands the economics, I recommend Unlearning Economics two-part series on him.) The reason ideologically consistent right libertarian economic thinkers support open borders is simple; they believe in free trade and truly free trade includes free movement of labor. The government shouldn’t decide where labor is allocated, the market should, but it can’t if governments put literal borders around where labor can go. Instead, closed borders trap labor where it’s not as useful and will be underpaid while driving down productivity and growth in the places it’s needed.

Indeed Libertarian and Liberal economists (like Paul Krugman) alike love to cite the Ricardian principle of “comparative advantage”, where if one country is good at making cloth and another country is good at making wine, putting up barriers to trade is simply a recipe for one country to have inferior and overpriced cloth and the other inferior and overpriced wine. By the same token, if one country has a surplus of laborers and another country has a shortage, the laborers should be allowed to move for maximum productivity, and an open, international job market can decide where the laborers are needed.

Now, Unlearning Economics actually has another video where he explains why “comparative advantage” is actually a lot more complicated then these economists seem to be willing to believe, and early 19th century economist David Ricardo’s examples of cloth and wine hide the way political relations and labor conditions (particularly slavery) played into trade conditions of the time, much as today the cheapness of labor and desire for migration in much of the world is not some accident of fate but the result of deliberate actions by Western powers that have kept them in ideal conditions for wealth extraction. For example, in the first decade of NAFTA, the free-trade agreement between Canada, the US, and Mexico signed by Bill Clinton, the wage gap between the US and Mexico grew by more than 10 percent. By 2002, wages for maquila workers in Mexico had fallen 14% below what they’d been in 1983, while in the same period productivity rates doubled. Meanwhile, migrants coming to the United States increase their wages by a factor of two to six. It’s little wonder they want to come here. By ensuring the free movement of goods but not the free movement of people, these trade agreements assure that multinational corporations can keep their low wage workers in the places they make low wages, all the better for their profits. (And this is putting aside the way the austerity policies of the World Bank, the IMF, and international trade agreements continue keeping the developing world ideal for wealth extraction.) I’ve talked before about how capitalists claims of capitalism lifting people in the developing world out of poverty are, shall we say, overblown, with the absolute poverty rate actually increasing dramatically since 1981 when you don’t shift the goalposts and fudge the numbers the way mainstream economists like to. On top of this, the ongoing ecological crisis is something wealthier countries are far more responsible for while poorer countries bear far more of the brunt of, spurring radical increases in mass migration that will only get worse over time. Some climate projections estimate that over thirty million migrants will be driven to the US border in the next 30 years. According to the World Bank, by 2050 the number of global climate migrants from South Asia alone could be as high as 35.7 million, while already in the five-year period from 2005 to 2010, around 8.5 million people migrated from South Asia because of drought and changing monsoon patterns. Thus the developed world created crises in countries we then endeavor to trap people in, much as the United States worked to destabilize countries that weren’t friendly to us and our business interests, like Honduras, where we (under Obama) backed an undemocratic coup in 2009 that destabilized the country and created a “nightmare” of violence and state-sanctioned repression, spurring on a surge of migration from there.

Meanwhile, the idea that immigrants depress the labor market and drive down wages is one of those notions that sounds plausible but doesn’t actually hold up to the evidence. A comprehensive report from Cornell University in 2016 found that migration resulted in “little to no negative effects on overall wages and employment of native-born workers in the longer term.” In 1979 and 1980, for example, during an economic downturn in Cuba, many Cubans wanted to flee to the United States. US President Jimmy Carter opened the door to them under the auspices that they were “victims of Communism” and Cuban President Fidel Castro said Cubans were free to leave. On top of this, the Cuban Adjustment act of 1966 had granted Cuban immigrants immediate work permits and the ability to get green cards after just a year of residency. Within a few months, 125,000 Cubans came to the United States, almost all of them to Miami which already had developed a large Cuban population following the so-called “Freedom Flights” of 1965-1973, which had themselves brought 300,000 Cubans to the country. In less than a year there was a 7 percent increase in the labor force in Miami. And so did this drive wages down? In fact, over a five-year period wages remained steady, with even an increase in African American worker wages. Did the new workers create unemployment? No, those numbers also remained steady.

The reason of course is because wages and unemployment aren’t a zero-sum game, new immigrants don’t just take jobs but create them by starting businesses, much as my own great-grandfather started a glass shop in Brooklyn after migrating here from Eastern Europe over a hundred years ago now. Other “natural experiments” in mass immigration show similar results, such as after the fall of the Soviet Union when 610,000 Russian Jews immigrated to Israel within six years and in the same period there unemployment declined and wages grew, or when 900,000 people arrived from Algeria to France in 1962 following that country’s independence, resulting in a “negligible effect on wages and unemployment”.

Another “natural experiment” happened when after the stock market crash of 1929, the US launched the Mexican Repatriation Act, deporting as many as two million people to Mexico including many US citizens of Mexican origin in one of America’s many great ethnic cleansings on the theory that it would create more jobs. Recent studies, however, show that especially in rural areas, wages for domestic workers actually decreased, with farmers struggling to complete harvests and shops seeing fewer customers.

The idea that immigrants “take jobs” and drive down wages has no basis in reality. The idea that even legal immigrants become drains on social services simply because they’re eligible for them also has no basis in reality.

But if you just let people in, it’s unfair to people who came hear legally and waited! You hear some complain. But “I suffered so you should have to suffer” is basically never a good argument for anything, and just a way to make sure the suffering never ends.

There’s also a notion that we have no room for more people. This also is nonsense. The US currently has a population density of 86 people per square mile, while France has 350 people per square mile, Belgium 976 per square mile, and South Korea 1,337 per square mile, and even those pale compared to, for example, Bangladesh’s 2,980 people per square mile. Only about 5% of America’s land is developed. Poland, with a population density of 320 people per square mile, was able to absorb 3 million Ukrainian refugees in a few months in 2022 following Russia’s invasion.

And while it’s true that open borders would mean a lot more immigration to the US, most people would stay home. We opened immigration to Cubans and most Cubans did not come here. In 1917, the people in the occupied territory of Puerto Rico were granted American citizenship with the free mobility that came with it, and Puerto Rico still has Puerto Ricans a hundred years later, despite the economic deprivations imposed by the US on Puerto Rico via the Jones Act of 1920 that prevents non-American ships from trading with it. But of course that’s the case—after all migration between states in the US is perfectly legal and Mississippi is a lot poorer than California, but that doesn’t mean everyone in Mississippi is going to suddenly pack their bags and head west. The essentially open borders of the 19th century did not empty out Italy, Ireland, or all or even most Russian Jews, and at no point was the number of immigrants more than the US could absorb nor did the waves of millions of immigrants cause the economic, social, or cultural disaster that the xenophobic right at the time expected—but more on that soon.

Actually, I said earlier that the US had essentially open borders until 1924 for everyone except the Chinese, and this isn’t precisely true. As has been pointed out by law prefessor Gerald L. Neuman in the Columbia Law Review in 1993, the picture of 19th century immigration law in the United States is just more complex than popularly understood. While the anti-Chinese Page Act of 1875 was the first explicit Federal legislation regulating immigration, individual states had implemented all sorts of restrictions on immigration before this. These included restrictions against migration by convicts (a particular sore point since before the revolution Britain had sent ships of convicts to the American colonies), restrictions against those with disease, and restrictions against those deemed likely to become paupers. On top of this, many states’ racial laws applied to both interstate and international immigration; for example free blacks were barred from immigration to most slave states, and all blacks were barred from migration to states like Oregon which, while being a free state, also desired to be a white one.

However, it’s also worth nothing that apart from the above caveats, the early United States was a place that actively encouraged immigration, at least by Europeans. One of the complaints in the Declaration of Independence was that King George III had “endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.” Following the 1862 Homesteading Act, thousands of acres of government-owned land West of the Mississippi was given away to whites and European immigrants, with the land giveaways advertised in European newspapers (that this land was taken from native peoples goes without saying). But there was also some non-European immigration encouraged by the government. The Chinese may have been excluded by the late 19th century, but less noted is that this restriction was actually part of a backlash to an earlier policy of encouraging Chinese immigration spurred by burgeoning American industries like railroads desire for cheap labor willing to work under dangerous conditions (supplementing the recently freed formerly enslaved people already filling these often highly perilous and underpaid rolls).

The Burlingame Treaty of 1868 guaranteed free immigration between the US and China. This treaty, part of a series of (unequal, due to China’s weak political position at the time) treaties encouraging trade and immigration with China, contained text that affirmed Enlightenment ideals of “the inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance, and also the mutual advantage of the free migration and emigration of their citizens and subjects respectively from the one country for the other, for purposes of curiosity, of trade, or as permanent residents.”

However, following this treaty and the rush of Chinese immigration that followed, America saw an outpouring of viciously racist anti-Chinese American media and a spate of massacres and pogroms against Chinese people from Wyoming to Washington State. Los Angeles in 1971 saw what remains the largest mass-lynching in American history, as 19 Chinese residents were murdered.

This is what lead to the Page Act of 1875, the first major Federal immigration law, which barred immigration to the US of convicts, Asian forced laborers, and Asian Prostitutes. Because this latter condition resulted in women needing to undergo invasive examinations to “prove” that they weren’t prostitutes, it essentially ended immigration of Chinese women to the US, which was its real aim—to allow in laborers without the means of reproduction (though ironically the surfeit of male laborers without women actually led to overall increase in prostitution). This was followed by the Angell Treaty of 1880, which allowed for larger immigration restrictions on the Chinese, and culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese immigration entirely for 10 years, and which was then extended in 1892, and made a permanent ban in 1902. It wouldn’t be repealed until 1943, when a small number of Chinese immigrants were again permitted.

But the Chinese were hardly the only immigrants to face backlash. The influx of impoverished Europeans of the 19th and early 20th century had resulted in much hand-wringing over the “purity” of American culture and race. The 1840s and 50s, for example, saw the rise of the Know-Nothings, who alleged there was a “Romanist” Great Replacement plot afoot to supplant protestants with Catholics, and who rioted in many cities, tarred a feathered a priest and burned down a Catholic church. Mexicans coming to California during the Gold Rush would also be subjects of lynching. The Ku Klux Klan opposed not just blacks but Jews and Catholics, and at least 20 Italians were lynched in the 1890s alone, and numerous Jews have also been the subjects of lynching. While lynching was still by far most deployed upon the African American population, once it had been developed for that purpose it was easy to direct it at other groups feared by the ethnic majority, the way tools of oppression always expand beyond their origins.

On top of this, the late 19th and early 20th century saw the rise and dominance in scientific literature of eugenics, with the academy all too happily used for the aims of anti-immigration, for example using badly formulated and administered IQ tests to prove that Northern Europeans were inherently superior to Italians and the Portuguese and so on. In 1912, the House Committee on Immigration “debated and doubted whether Italians were full-blooded Caucasians”. Per “Defining America’s Racial Boundaries: Blacks, Mexicans, and European Immigrants, 1890-1945” by Cybelle Fox and Thomas A. Guglielmo in the American Journal of Sociology, conventional wisdom at the time was that these Southern and Eastern Europeans were “biologically and culturally less intelligent, more criminal, less manly, less courageous, less fit (if fit at all) for self-government, and, thus, were a serious menace to the American nation”. Their own countries were a mess, the logic went, why would they make ours any different? Indeed, I’m hardly the first to point out that the same arguments used against Latin American, Asian, and African immigrants today have much in common with the same arguments that were used a hundred years ago against the ancestors of the same people objecting to immigrants today.

Thus the stage was set for the 1917 immigration act that curtailed entry to the country by “undesirables” like the “feeble-minded”, anarchists, epileptics, paupers, political radicals, and contract laborers and, perhaps most importantly, instituted a literacy test aimed at keeping out those who didn’t already speak English, which helped stem immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. However, it was the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 that almost completely closed the arms of lady liberty. Immigration from not just China but all of Asia was banned completely, and strict and minuscule quotas were instituted for Eastern and Southern Europe with a total yearly immigration quota set at a bare 20% of what immigration had been the year before the bill was enacted. The sponsors of the bill, Representative Albert Johnson and Senator David Reed, explicitly touted it as bulwark against “a stream of alien blood” with Senator Reed claiming its goal was to “Preserve Racial Type as it Exists Here Today”.

As eugenics became discredited, particularly following the horrors of the Second World War, the far right learned to use more veiled language than this, moving from portraying immigrants as a threat to the bloodline to portraying immigrants as a threat to “Western Culture” and “Western Values”. However, that euphemistic veil has gradually found itself lifted, particularly since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Just listen to right wing saint Charlie Kirk talk about immigration law.

Charlie Kirk: “America was at its peak when we halted immigration for forty years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that. … The American Democrat party hate this country, they want to see America collapse, they love it when America becomes less white.” https://youtu.be/pFdO8jYWOeY?si=AgjCUmxHwS8BNgHm&t=699

Kirk is, of course, playing fast and loose with history here. A few years after we closed the borders, the country and world were plunged into the Great Depression, and the prosperity he’s talking about was actually caused by a confluence of New Deal policies (and the general ascendency of social democratic policies worldwide) and the fact that America was essentially the last industrialized nation standing following the Second World War. Indeed this prosperity probably also owes a lot to the fact that it followed an unprecedented period of mass immigration, rather than that it coincided with the end of it.

But the use of the word “white” here is of course the giveaway to what Kirk is really on about. Where the Right used to pretend at merit-based color-blindness, they now openly prefigure America becoming less white as a threat. And why would it be a threat if whites weren’t inherently superior to non-whites? Why would it matter unless you were definitionally a racist?

Kirk, after all, loved to wax on about the inherent violence and criminality of black people, using a bunch of made-up or misleading statistics. He’s the guy who said he was nervous if he saw a black guy piloting his airplane. Wait, what’s that? Has the news cycle already moved on from Charlie Kirk too? Sorry, I take too long to make these things, I just can’t keep up.

As Kirk and Trump would have it, immigration control is important because “If you don’t have borders you don’t have a nation”. Did we not have a nation before 1924? The idea is absurd. Originally, I was going to do another song and dance about the history of nationalism and ethno-nationlism like I did in “Gravity’s Rainbow over Palestine”. But honestly, it seems pointless now because the MAGA folks have consistently bent over backwards to make it clear that they’re concerned far less with some nebulous notion of “national identity” than simply hateful and afraid of non-white people. They’ll use cultural signifiers as part of their discrimination, getting butthurt about a guy liking fajitas or mad that Zohran Mamdani ate rice with his hands that time, or cry about having to press 1 for English on the phone. But let’s be real. At least Zionists are consistent in their ethno-nationalist exclusivity of wanting a homeland for the Jews and nobody else (not that this is right, only that it’s consistent). But in America, there’s no nationalist hand-wringing about Trump bringing white South Africans here. Instead, we have Trump waxing about how these Somalis are bad when what he really wants are immigrants from Scandinavia. Apparently you can have a nation without borders for white people. When Trump uses the shooting of National Guardsmen by an Afghan immigrant to attempt to cease immigration from “all third-world countries”, he’s completely forgone any pretense that he’s not just interested in making America White Again.

The right-wing currently has a bit of an obsession with birthrates, something that’s already been the subject of excellent videos from Tom Nicholas and Philosophy Tube. They’re panicking, publicly and at length, about how the birthrates in developed countries like the United States are declining and in many places are already below replacement rate, and they warn that if the trend continues, whole countries could simply disappear, as if some people deciding to have fewer children was the same as everyone deciding to have no children at all. (As Philosophy Tube pointed out, we’ve seen declines and rebounds in population rates before with concurrent panics about underpopulation and overpopulation.)

But the Right’s solutions clue you in to what they’re really concerned about. For example, they don’t support programs that have been shown to increase birth rates like universal public day care, which Vice President Vance called, bizarrely, “class war against normal people” and “a massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent over the preferences of middle and working class”. Of course, what Vance actually means it that public day care would undermine the man’s place in the hierarchy as “breadwinner” while women fulfill their roles as “child-rearer”. As Kirk would have it, the wife must submit to their husband. Moreover, you don’t want people to have “dependence” on the state, by which they mean what they always mean, which is to say they don’t think society should take care of people.

Of course, another very obvious and demonstrably effective solution to population decline is immigration. But just as obviously that’s the last thing they want, unless those immigrants happen to be white. Instead they simply implore people to have more babies. Racial purity, racial dominance, and white patriarchy are actually far more important than any supposed economic or social issues caused by population decline. In fact, it’s the actual issue with population decline, because the only population they care about the decline of at all is the white one.

And, not to rehash too much from “Gravity’s Rainbow over Palestine”, but of course if you believe that a superior race is being supplanted by an inferior one, if the inferior one is getting rights and privileges and a place in society that they hadn’t before, it can’t be because they deserve it or are doing anything on their own, because they’re inferior. There must be some smart people behind it, maybe some smart people with a “dialectical hatred of whites” as the tweetenfurher would have it. It’s the Jews, with Ol’ George Soros as their ring-leader, orchestrating, as Charlie Kirk would have it, “a strategy to replace white, rural America with something different.”

And so issues like trans rights, gay rights, abortion, pornography, and feminism get wrapped up in this conspiratorial framing of secret plans to reduce the white race, because they can’t let themselves understand things in terms of personal choice and freedom, despite their seeming love that particular word. Someone can’t just be gay, it’s “unnatural”, despite homosexual relationships having been observed in over 1,500 species in the wild. No, they have to have been deliberately made that way, just like the teachers are “transing” our children, and why would they do that if they didn’t have a radical woke agenda to destroy the white race?

If this sounds like something out of Mein Kampf, well, it’s just another way it feels like they’re punking us at this point, right?

It’s not just the Department of Homeland Security Xitter feed posting about our proud heritage with a picture of white colonizers displacing natives. Not just the decidedly Nazi-esque posts of the white heroic man on the Department of Labor Xitter feed. Not just the Coast Guard no longer classifying swastikas and nooses as hate symbols. Not just the sitting Senator giving a speech about how “our” glorious Christian ancestors “poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world” against the brutalization of Indian war bands (and defending settler’s brutalization of them), calling America “our birthright, our heritage, our destiny” and lamenting that “If America is everything and everyone, then it is nothing and no one at all”, a speech that seems more suited to a Klan rally than anything else. Or the Republican candidate for governor promising to “make the trains run on time”, a direct reference to Mussolini (even though Mussolini only actually made the trains run on time for rich people). Not just the president’s confidant Laura Loomer being so Islamophobic she refuses to ride in a taxi driven by a Muslim and feels entitled to publicly complain about it on social media. Not just how they’ve repeatedly hung their banners on the mast of “Free Speech absolutism”and then happily revoke the visas of legal immigrants who criticize Charlie Kirk on social media (among many other things, including criticizing Israel).

It’s stuff like Trump declaring “Antifa” a terrorist organization, despite it not being an organization at all but rather an umbrella term for people who oppose fascism, something tacitly if unintentionally admitted at the presidential roundtable on the subject where Pizzagate affectionado Jack Posobiec discussed the roots of Antifa going back to “the Weimar Republic”. It’s Alex Jones literally putting on a Hitler mustache, or guy people pretend isn’t an obvious fascist Tucker Carlson hosting actual Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, which has apparently caused a hilarious bit of infighting between the Nazi MAGAs and the MAGAs who apparently didn’t quite get what this all actually adds up to, with Ben Shapiro the classic case of someone who never thought leopards would eat his face. And of course there’s Elon Musk’s zieg heils, the fact that he fed his AI with the kind of training data that had it praise Hitler and then declare itself “MechaHitler”, a man personally responsible for the shutdown of USAID early last year which is has already killed an estimated 600,000 people, almost entirely nonwhite people and therefore people whose lives apparently don’t matter and making him one of the greatest mass murderers of the 21st century. And then of course the moment they’re called on any of this they act shocked—shocked!—that anyone would call them a Nazi and you can’t just call anyone who disagrees with you a Nazi and leftists are the real Nazis and so on and so on, just straight-up doing that German comedy sketch where the guy in the Nazi uniform asks another guy in a Nazi uniform “Do you think I’m a Nazi?” At least Trump seems to be getting less upset by people correctly identifying him as a fascist.

Trump’s one-time advisor Steve Bannon came out telling his people to wear the label “racist” as a badge of honor, though that didn’t stop Governor Gavin Newsom from inviting him on a podcast, thus helpfully illustrating why centrism is no response to fascism. And as the Centrist Democrats continually chase the racists right on immigration, they only help shift the Overton window towards harder immigration laws and more deportations, which then only empowers the most xenophobic and racist elements in our society. And so you end up with the putative leader of the UK labour party quoting Britain’s most famous ultra-Racist politician.

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Yes, you’ll hear the Right lament about allowing undocumented immigrants being unfair to people who do things properly, but we see what they do to people who do things properly, arresting them at their hearings for refugee status, at their green card interviews, or stopping them moments before they’re about to become US citizens.

Trump advisor and chief-of-staff Stephen Miller lays down what they really think of non-white people, that we’re “not just importing individuals”, we’re “importing societies” that will “recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands”, bringing back arguments made about Miller’s own Jewish ancestors a century ago.

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And this is the thing folks don’t understand or don’t want to face, that whatever rhetoric those who want to restrict immigration might use, it’s always, always rooted in racism. To reference the Chris Rock bit again, you hear someone hating immigrants, you wait a bit and you’ll get to them hating blacks and Jews. “That train’s never late”.

And the thing about the Nazi comparisons is that it’s still unreal to me that the Nazis we’re just shipping off whole families to gas chambers to die for the crime of being Jewish, families exactly like mine. But the thing is, as I talked about in “Gravity’s Rainbow Over Palestine”, murdering them in camps wasn’t their first plan. Their first plan was to ship them away, and they did for example ship 60,000 Jews to Palestine before Britain shut down Jewish immigration there amid a Palestinian revolt. Every other country for the most part refused categorically to take Jews, with literal boat loads of refugees turned away to die. And once the war began, Jewish flight became dramatically more difficult amid the British embargo. It was only when all plans to expel Jews, including one to ship them to Madagascar, failed that the Nazis began exterminating my people wholesale. And that process began with a declaration that Jews were not Germans, were not European, were not like us and part of our nation. By virtue of their race, they had to be excised from the society. But it reached its conclusion not just because the Nazis were antisemitic monsters, but because every other country closed their borders.

Abducting people because they’re Jews is only a step away from abducting people because they’re undocumented. In both cases, you’ve made up a law that says a person doesn’t belong here because of who they are, no matter what they happen to be doing here.

I live in Queens, which has more immigrants than perhaps any other place on Earth. Around the corner from me, a restaurant worker we all knew with a wife and children here was grabbed up by ICE and carted away in chains. Another man and his six-year-old son were snatched up and separated and now no one knows where the child is and a lot of people are trying desperately to find out. A first grader.

In Queens we know that it’s only the places where there are few immigrants or where immigrants are kept well segregated from non-immigrants that the hatred festers, that contrary to racist rhetoric, it’s not mixing cultures but the segregation of them that breeds contempt.

And the thing is, it just doesn’t have to be this way.

While, immigration law never became again as open as it was in the 19th century, the still-active Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 finally did away with quotas based on national origin (which had already been relaxed by the previous Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952), and instead used a system based on preferencing relatives and children of current citizens and legal residents, skilled laborers, religious workers, foreign nationals who’d served in the US Military, refugees, and “investors” (which is to say, rich people) willing to “make a large-scale investment in the US economy”.

As per The Case for Open Borders (2024) by John Washington, “As recently as the 1960s, immigration detention was practically abolished. In 1970, less than 600 people in the United States were charged with an immigration crime. And as recently as 1993, less than 2,500 people were charged with immigration crimes.” Compare this to 185,042 people arrested by ICE from Oct 1st 2024 to May 31st 2025 alone. In 1986, Republican President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act, a bipartisan bill which gave full amnesty to anyone who’d entered the country illegally prior to January 1st, 1982, with about 2.7 million undocumented people applying for an receiving permanent residency. The law also relieved employers from the obligation of checking employees legal status before hiring them (which reemphasizes that undocumented immigrants still get jobs where they pay social security and other taxes). A 2015 study linked this amnesty to an approximate 3-5% reduction in crime.

Thus, the idea that someone who comes here to make a better life for themselves and their family and do essential work should be thrown in an Alligator Alcatraz for the temerity is something fundamentally new, an idea younger than I am, and it’s something we can easily do away with.

But I think it’s not a coincidence that the wheels have come off our immigration system hand-in-hand with the steady destruction of the New Deal paradigm of regulations, taxation, and anti-monopoly policies since the rise of Neoliberalism in the late 70s and the destruction of American prosperity along with it. As I said back in “Loki: How Conservatism Becomes Fascism”, economic troubles like constant boom-and-bust cycles, out-of-control costs of basic amenities like food and housing, and unprecedented wealth inequality feeds the need for a scapegoat, for someone to blame and focus anger on, which is why the billionaires who are actually responsible have been desperately funneling money into media machines from Newsmax to Xitter and now Paramount and CBS to shift the blame on the poorest and most vulnerable people in society and losing their minds when someone shoots a Health Insurance CEO, terrified people are discovering who the problem really is. Just the same way, the rich of Germany’s Weimar Republic fell over themselves to fund the Nazi party during its economic troubles and the Great Depression as those same conditions also raised interest in the socialism and communism which threatened them and their property. And as I’ve said before, this isn’t some well-organized conspiracy hatched in smokey backrooms, it’s all out in the open with the most visible faces of anti-immigrant reaction in America being the billionaire president and the literal richest man in the world who routinely call anyone to the left of Mussolini a ‘radical Marxist’.

The thing is, we already have open borders for rich people, don’t we? Mexican billionaire and one-time richest person in the world Carlos Slim sure doesn’t have any trouble securing a visa. He may not be white (he’s in fact descended from Lebanese immigrants), but if he wanted to relocate here, Trump and his fellows would roll out the red carpet. For all their rhetoric about Muslim extremists, Saudi Sheiks who literally helped bankroll Al Qaedi don’t have any trouble coming here. No, we make oil deals with them and brush off them brutally murdering a journalist while we deport the guy who works at the convenience store on the corner and accuse him of ruining the country and threatening Western values. If you have enough money and power, who you are and what you believe suddenly ceases to matter.

You might well say, waitaminute, I thought you said this is all rooted in racism, how can that be true of these folks still love rich Sheiks? What about JD Vance’s Indian American wife (though maybe not his wife for much longer)? There’s also probably a number of right wing trolls already in the comment section angrily pointing out that they really like Japan and they can’t racist because they’re really into anime. But because racism and white supremacy are fundamentally more about establishing norms of hierarchy and power, there’s always going to be model minorities who can get a pass as long as they toe the line. Their presence and acceptance, though, is always conditional, like the H1B skilled worker visas that tech billionaires like Musk crave but which Trump torpedoed by implementing a $100,000 fee for. Much the same way as in Superman (2025), Luthor seems to have a deep, ideological hatred of metas except for the ones he finds useful and chooses to keep around, Trump and Vance can keep a few chosen immigrants around if they want to.

But then, Superman (2025) wants to be a movie about immigrants and embracing those who are different. The entire story turns on revelations about Superman’s foreign origins and whether or not they mean he can be trusted, with a b-plot about a more powerful and white country sided with Luthor trying to invade and take over a less powerful non-white country. And Luthor blithely murders a Superman-loving immigrant to manipulate Superman in a scene that seems pretty horrific for a movie aimed at families where a flying dog helps save the day. (Though, to be fair, Luthor seems to view everyone but himself as sub-human, which is also a sentiment that seems to jibe with certain billionaires today. In fact, the main thing that differentiates Luthor from real billionaires is that Luthor in the film is actually a super-genius, while real billionaires generally only think they are, as I discussed in “Elon Musk, Wokeness, and the Myth of Meritocracy”.)

The problem here is that in the film Superman’s parents really are the nefarious foreign threat bent on totalitarian conquest that Republicans think immigrants are the tools of. (The fact that the movie goes out of its way to establish that this revelation is true, despite the fact that Luthor has more than enough funds to fabricate such a thing, seems to stretch incredulity even in a movie where a person can fly and shoot lasers from his eyes, but I understand why writer-director James Gunn didn’t want to dwell on technical details that would detract from the story he wanted to tell.)

Indeed, a suspiciously powerful people whose home has been destroyed and who desire to undermine America and the world for their own conquest makes Kryptonians here suspiciously stand-ins for conspiracy theorists’ fever dreams about Jews, though I’m sure this is unintentional. And this all ultimately leads to Superman giving a triumphant speech where he declares, “I’m as human as anyone.” By the end, Superman has symbolically replaced the message from his Kryptonian birth parents that he soothed himself with at the beginning with with clips of home videos of his childhood with his adoptive human parents.

You can see how Gunn got here. He wanted to tell a story about an immigrant who faces rejection because of where he’s from, the way racists associate Mexican migrants with cartels they have nothing to do with, or Muslim migrants with far-right Islamic governments, or people from Communist countries with those country’s policies and so on. It also becomes a convenient lever for the dramatic reversal where the public turns against him, playing into the hands of the evil billionaire who’s the actual threat. And it some ways this even works, because despite handwringing about “losing our culture” to foreigners, immigrants and their first generation children are typically far more patriotic than those whose families have been here for a long time, and that first generation are all the more eager to embrace the new culture. I don’t think I could ever love America as much as my grandfather, who came here from Eastern Europe as a child where he was impoverished and oppressed and built a great life for himself and his family.

But the story unintentionally implies that immigrants must reject their home culture, because that home culture was actively destructive, something which feeds into the Stephen Miller’s racist blather about people bringing their bad cultures with them or those old conspiracies about Catholics coming here to implement Romanism, or modern conspiracies about Muslims coming here to implement Sharia Law. In other words, it is, in its own, well-meaning, liberal way actually thematically anti-multiculturalism. Luthor it turns out is right, Kryptonians are a threat, and it’s only by virtue of the fact that Superman actively rejects his Kryptonian heritage that he is good.

And the thing is, Gunn’s Superman really is much more human than previous iterations. Where Reeves and Cavill both come off somewhat distant and unapproachable in their perfection, Corenswet is very much just this guy doing his best surrounded by people who don’t get him, the kind of good-natured square who’d say maybe trusting people is the real punk rock. And unlike Snyder’s self-serious and moody Justice League, the ‘Justice Gang’ are a trio of self-absorbed mercenaries in the employ of a billionaire who seems to use them for publicity. Synder’s Superman was less a role model to be emulated than a god to be worshipped, and very much fed into the way superheroes can easily become right wing figures, special people for whom rules don’t necessarily apply and of whom ordinary folks merely jealous, easily fooled, and liable to get in the way or hold them back. In other words, they feed into an idea of natural hierarchies and black-and-white worldviews where there are good people who must be defended and bad people whose lives are expendable. And Gunn intentionally bucks against that, by making his Justice Gang flawed and self-absorbed, with Superman and Lois Lane just trying to convince them to do the right thing. But this is still a world where the public at large and its government are easily manipulated by nefarious forces, and where the best we can hope for is that some wondrous hero will swoop in and save us. In other words, the film finds itself thematically caught between impulses, of showing us that the heroes are just like us while simultaneously framing them killing and maiming the enemy when they don’t really have to (as Superman earlier implores them to, they can find ways to stop monsters without killing them) in triumphant, punch-the-air terms, because they’re figures worthy of single-handedly deciding who lives and who dies. (And think of how much more satisfying it would have been after Superman lamented they couldn’t find a way to stop the monster without killing it if he’d been able to find a way to stop Ultraman without killing him, maybe even reform him.) The film is, in other words, drenched in American liberalism, a center-left ideology not to be confused with leftism, that wants to help the weak and powerless without actually addressing the fundamental issues that cause them to be weak and powerless.

But Gunn’s film actually exposes the real problem without being willing to fully confront it. The real problem, in the story as in reality, is that unfathomable wealth grants unfathomable power to a select few, allowing them to corrupt the justice system and the law. It’s almost as if the actual issue is that rich people are allowed to hoard the resources to construct entire pocket universes for themselves and damn everyone else at their whims.

But then Superman (2025) and superhero films in general are just maladapted to address the fact that systemic problems require systemic solutions, and systemic solutions aren’t achieved by lone figures on their own, or a few special people with special abilities, they’re achieved through collective action.

The most righteous act of civil disobedience ever put into a Superman film is oddly found in the otherwise dreadful Superman IV (1987), where Superman decides to gather up all the world’s nuclear weapons and throw them into the sun. But as he acknowledges at the end of the film, peace isn’t his to give. To quote a certain recently elected mayor I’m rather fond of, politics are something we do, not something done to us.

I get why it’s hard to believe in truth and justice the way Superman does when Trump is in the Oval Office and not behind bars, pardoning every fraudster and drug trafficker around while evidence of his involvement in child sex trafficking becomes more obvious by the day. But if we look at real heroes who risked everything to do the right thing against the system, we think of people like Harriet Tubman. And while Harriet Tubman is worth celebrating, it’s important to understand that she was part of an Underground Railroad network made up of an unknown number of other heroes working together to free people and undermine an unjust system. Though hardly on the same scale, today ICE whistles and protests are used to combat jack-booted ICE thugs coming to abduct our neighbors, and it’s proven effective at defending our communities. Because justice is something we do together and systems are things we change together.

To me, what’s great about Superman isn’t that he can save us, it’s that by being the big blue Boy Scout, by believing in uncomplicated goodness and justice and compassion despite everything that’s wrong with the world, he shows us who we could be at our best. And the best thing he does in this film isn’t beating Ultraman or saving a squirrel or a baby, but inspiring his friends to do what’s right because he knows he can’t do it alone. Even if I wish those friends were more willing to follow his example once they did so, or that if they had to really fight them, they were somehow fighting with the Jarhanpurians rather than merely saving them, so that it wasn’t just about a little brown child praying for help from the great white savior.

There’s a narrative that ideas like open borders aren’t practical to pursue, the same way a lot of Democrats in power say things like Bernie Sander’s push for Medicare for All is a “pie-in-the-sky” dream that we can’t possible really do. But, as the Connecticut Lottery used to say, “you can’t win if you don’t play”. You don’t get Medicare for All without saying you want it and telling people repeatedly and at length about why you want it. And the same is true for open borders. Open borders are morally, economically, and practically right and correct, and we should say so, we should scream it from the mountains. Bernie Sanders revived interest in democratic socialism by simply daring to call himself a democratic socialist, by looking people in the eye and telling them that socialism is good, actually. But, you say, if politicians say they want open borders the Republicans will have a field day and smear them mercilessly. Let them. Welcome it. Because this is exactly the same trick they’ve been using for years, saying things the left will object to and force the left to talk about, because that’s how you force it into the public conversation, that’s how you move the Overton Window. Anyway, the Right already call Democratic policies open borders when they’re not at all, they called Biden an open borders president when he deported more people than anyone. If they’re going to call us it anyway, let’s embrace it. Let’s run on it. Because it’s right.

Closed borders have created a system of global Apartheid, where the nation one is born into governs the rule and economic conditions under which one is shackled. The UN Bill of Rights declares that everyone has the fundamental right to leave their own country but this right feels hollow without a concomitant right to enter another one.

As we’ve explored here, liberal hand-wringing about “sensible” amounts of immigration are just half measures that are actually neither sensible nor moral, and please neither the people who want open immigration nor the racists who want the borders kept closed. Further, the desire to keep borders closed is fundamentally a racist one, and the cries of “white genocide” and “great replacement” are not some fringe aberration but their natural endpoint. No one likes a centrist for the same reason nobody likes someone who’s just halfway racist.

We stand at a moment when the immoral realities of closed borders have never been more apparent and where people are finally actively organizing to defend their communities against the anti-immigration policies designed to destroy them. Half-measures will not do, and even if a Democrat is elected to presidency again and the ostensibly left American party takes back control of Congress, we can’t all just quietly go back to pretending mass deportations aren’t happening and aren’t horrific like we did with Obama and Biden. We understand the stakes and we understand the sides. It’s time to choose them.

Hey thanks for watching. If you want to know what you can do to help things here in the United States, I recommend joining the Democratic Socialists of America or another political group or whatever the equivalent in your area that’s actively organizing for a more egalitarian society. The DSA gets some slack in leftist circles for all sorts of reasons, but as far as I know they’re still the group most responsible for actually knocking on doors and getting folks elected and bills passed.

There’s a bunch more stuff I wrote about Superman and cut that I’ll put up on Patreon along with exclusive author’s notes and other fun stuff. You can support me for as little as $1 at Patreon.com/ericrosenfield. I want to thank all my Patreons, your support means the world to me.

Bibliography

Books

  • The Case for Open Borders, John Washington, 2024
  • Open Borders: the Science and Ethics of Immigration, Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith, 2025

Papers

  • “The Lost Century of Immigration Law”, Gerald L. Neuman, Columbia Law Review, 1993
  • “Genocide: Was it the Nazis Original Plan?”, Yehuda Bauer, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1980

Videos

Links

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