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An editorial in The Hollywood Reporter co-written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist claims that Superman is an “illegal alien,” and that the Man of Steel “wouldn’t exist without birthright citizenship” while comparing President Donald Trump to a “supervillain.”
“When filmmaker James Gunn called his new ‘Superman’ film an immigrant story, critics accused him of politicizing Superman. But you can’t politicize the truth. Superman has been an ‘illegal alien’ for 87 years—a fact we helped America remember when we launched our 2013 campaign, Superman Is an Immigrant,” the column, written by Andrew Slack and Jose Antonio Vargas, claimed.
Vargas was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings in the Washington Post.
‘Superman’ director James Gunn made headlines last week when he proclaimed that the figure was an “immigrant who came from other places,” and that the movie would be political.
Superman was created in 1938 by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster in Cleveland, Ohio, and depicts the story of Kal-El, the last son of the dying planet Krypton, whose parents save him from his planet’s destruction by launching him in a spaceship that ultimately lands in Kansas. Kal El, an orphan, is given the name Clark Kent by his adoptive parents and ultimately grows up to become Superman.
“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,” Gunn told The Sunday Times.
Slack and Vargas defended Gunn by claiming that Superman has always been political, and pointed to past comics and radio plays in which Superman took on Hitler, the Ku Klux Klan, xenophobia and defended Ferguson protesters from riot police.
The column also claimed that Superman could not exist without birthright citizenship, a policy that the Trump administration has targeted in its push to reign in America’s dysfunctional immigration system. Birthright citizenship guarantees anyone born in the United States citizenship, and was adopted with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868.
“Today, that outsider would be deported. In fact, without birthright citizenship, Superman would never have existed at all. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, born in Cleveland to Jewish immigrant parents, would have been stripped of citizenship and deported to Nazi-controlled Europe—to face certain death in countries they’d never known. No Jerry and Joe means no Superman. No Superman means no superhero genre,” the column stated.
The Supreme Court issued a ruling restricting lower courts’ ability to block Trump’s executive order targeting birthright citizenship, but a federal court went on to file an injunction against the order – which would have deprived citizenship to some babies born on U.S. soil — shortly after.
The Hollywood Reporter columnists, who previously launched the “Superman is an Immigrant” campaign in 2013, likened the president to a supervillain and claimed he was the basis for DC comics’ portrayal of Lex Luthor in the ’80’s.
“Of course, we couldn’t have predicted Donald Trump—the man DC Comics literally used as their model to reboot Lex Luthor in 1986—waging war on the very immigrants Superman represents. In 2000, Luthor became president in the comics, complete with an anti-alien agenda. No one imagined the real President Trump would follow the same playbook,” the column said. “Superman is America’s conscience wearing a cape—and that terrifies critics because they’re supporting a real-life supervillain.”
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