Superman is an Illegal Immigrant

In 2013, Define America launched the 'Superman is an Illegal Immigrant' campaign, which was meant to advocate for the rights of Dreamers, or undocumented immigrant children who were protected from deportation by Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The campaign used narratives drawn from popular culture to reconfigure one of the most iconic figures in the American cultural landscape as an undocumented immigrant who uses his considerable powers to assert his nationalistic identity. The underlying implication of the campaign is that as n alien from another planet, Superman is a literal representation of the most extreme state of undocumented immigration, and yet he is an American cultural icon who stands for "Truth, Justice, and the American Way" -- a statement which subsumes his legal immigrant status within his cultural assimilation in the country in which he grew up. The DACA program is currently under imminent threat from Trump, who has proposed dismantling it within a period of 6 months from September 2017. In response, immigration activists have launched the #HereToStay social media movement, which is meant to unite a network of people who are ready to support, and fight for immigrants at risk for deportation.

As a researcher interested in digital activism and participatory culture, I have always found memes to have significant political power, particularly because of the ease with which they propagate through social networks. The power of a meme lies not in its virality, but the degree to which it can inspire participation and remixing. As a meme, #HereToStay can be used in a variety of ways that signify the resistance of politically precarious populations to governmental attempts to index, and regulate their numbers, or even pose threats to their rights to exist and assemble in public. The biopolitics of precarity is opposed through the use of memes, which are essentially anonymous, and travel through vast networks through deregulated, connective channels of communication.

In the meme above, for instance, I used an image of Superman breaking through concrete walls (symbolic of Trump's most iconic campaign promise), and announcing his support of the endangered DACA program. Neither the image, nor the message are original creations. However, memes are not about originality; they are about the potential for creative remixing. By combining the graphic of Superman with a core sentiment of immigrant activism, the meme recalls the Define America campaign, and links it with themes of truth, justice, and social reform, while collectively enforcing the idea that immigrant rights are intrinsically American, as represented by the vociferous support of an intrinsically American (albeit alien) superhero figure.