Dean Cain, who donned the Superman cape in the 1990s TV series Lois & Clark, recently announced he’ll be working with ICE. The irony is so thick you could cut it with a kryptonite knife. Here we have an actor who played America’s most famous illegal alien—a literal undocumented immigrant who crossed intergalactic borders without permission—now joining the agency tasked with deportation. It’s enough to make you wonder if Cain ever actually read a Superman comic or if he just memorized his lines.
Shortly before James Gunn’s newest silver screed adaption was released, Cain complained that portraying Superman as “an immigrant thing” was a mistake that would “hurt the numbers on the movie.” He insisted that wanting people to “follow our immigration laws” shouldn’t be seen as negative, apparently missing that the most famous character he ever portrayed broke every immigration law on the books. Baby Kal-El didn’t arrive with a visa. The Kents didn’t file paperwork with United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). There was no green card application for refugees from the planet Krypton. Superman is, by every legal definition conservatives like Cain love to invoke, exactly the kind of alien they claim threatens American society.
But here’s what really reveals the depth of Cain’s misunderstanding: Superman’s story has always been an immigrant narrative. This isn’t some new “woke” reinterpretation by modern Hollywood. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, children of Jewish immigrants, created Superman in 1938 during a period of intense anti-immigrant sentiment and rising fascism. The immigrant metaphor of Superman isn’t subtle—it’s the foundation of the entire mythology.
Cain argues that immigrants can’t come to America wanting to “get rid of all the rules” and make it “more like Somalia,” warning that “society will fail” without strict limits. Yet Superman’s entire story refutes this zero-sum thinking. The last son of Krypton didn’t try to transform Earth into his dead planet. Instead, he became the ultimate example of successful integration—maintaining his Kryptonian heritage while embodying the best values of his adopted home. He kept his birth name, Kal-El, while also being Clark Kent. He built a Fortress of Solitude to preserve his culture while dedicating his life to protecting Earth. That’s the actual immigrant experience—not abandonment of identity but synthesis of old and new.
Cain’s failure to grasp Superman extends beyond immigration, as he also recently complained about the Kent family being portrayed as “stupid rednecks,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that these salt-of-the-earth farmers are the moral center of Superman’s universe. As the Superman: Red Son brilliantly illustrated—a storyline where Superman was reimagined to have landed in the Soviet Union instead of Kansas—it’s not Kryptonian DNA that makes Superman a good person. It’s the Kents’ compassion, humility, and decency that shaped him into a hero rather than a tyrant. Without Jonathan and Martha Kent’s rural American values, Superman becomes something else entirely, something sinister. Those “stupid rednecks” are literally the reason Superman fights for truth and justice rather than ruling through strength.
What’s particularly telling is that while Cain fretted about the new movie’s immigrant themes possibly hurting domestic box office, Superman has actually performed well domestically but struggled internationally. And why might that be? Perhaps because Superman has become so intertwined with American identity that when America’s global reputation suffers, so does his. Under the current political moment, with America’s international standing at historic lows, the world is less eager to embrace a character wrapped in American symbolism. The immigrant story isn’t hurting Superman; American nativism is.
The tragedy here is that Cain is rallying conservatives to abandon a character who should be their natural champion. Superman represents the successful assimilation they claim to want—an immigrant who embraced American values, contributed immeasurably to society, and became a symbol of hope. He learned English, got a job at a great American newspaper, and fell in love with Lois Lane. He’s literally everything conservatives say they want from immigrants—except he had no documents and would have been deported by the very agencies they champion.
This isn’t about making Superman political. It’s about recognizing what he’s always been—a story about the potential within every refugee, every immigrant, every stranger who arrives on our shores seeking safety. When Dean Cain puts on an ICE badge while criticizing Superman’s immigrant story, he’s not protecting American values. He’s betraying the very core of the mythology that made him famous.
Superman saves the world regularly precisely because the Kents didn’t check his immigration status before saving him from that crashed rocket. That’s not a bug in the Superman story—it’s the entire point.
Nicholas Creel is an associate professor of business law at Georgia College & State University.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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