Superman: Our Favorite Immigrant Comes as Real-Life Villains Terrorize Us

Nobody has invited me to a screening of “Superman” and I’m fine with that.

Honestly, I was planning on blowing it off until it showed up on streaming. That’s because since “Avengers: Endgame,” I’ve been kinda slowly weaning myself off of superhero movies because I felt it was a nice bookend to the genre, which had served its purpose. For my nerd dollar, I was looking forward to spending it on sci-fi universes that I had yet to discover.

But the $225 million James Gunn-directed, DC Universe, summer blockbuster hype machine that they hope will bring you back to the movies, sell your kids a bunch of merch they don’t need, plus ply you with junk food tie-ins, arrives on July 11 anyway. It doesn’t matter if nobody asked for it, you’re gonna get it because Warner Bros. will be damned if they let Disney make all the cash.

So even though I’m not going to a screening, I’ll probably go see it, not out of anticipation or even a childlike desire, but out of defiance given the current political climate.

Yeah, that’s right, defiance. You see, Superman, as we know him, is an undocumented alien. And this country – at least the current federal government – has gone out of its way to perpetuate hatred of people who have come to America and stay here with no paperwork.

But here’s a man – a white dude at that – who came not from another land, but another planet, and he’s been living among us since 1938.

What People Don’t Get About Superman

You know the story: Super smart scientist dad pisses off the establishment when he tells them their spot is about to blow up, literally.

But he’s crafty enough to build a small spaceship just big enough to fit his kid in (but for some reason, not himself and his wife), and instead of sending it to another society as advanced as his own, he targets a world at war with itself, 42 light years away full of toothless goobers and thousands of years behind it in development. The baby will grow up an outcast, but he’ll have godlike advantages over everyone else.

When he does grow up, it’s clear he’s a nice guy, but not as smart as his dad, because instead of becoming a scientist, he actually chooses to go into journalism. This, rather than just lording over a world that would be defenseless against him.

But if you’ve been reading the comics over the years, watching a series of blockbuster movies (including some that really sucked) TV cartoons and playing video games, you’ll also know that this alien has saved the world, the solar system, the galaxy and the universe from countless villains. He never vanquished any of them permanently, but somehow all of reality still exists, here and in other dimensions, because of Superman’s strength, bravery, and ability. He was so important, they even killed him and brought him back.

In all this time, nobody ever seemed to mind that there was nothing exclusively American about him. By definition, he was alien. Think about it: two Ohio high schoolers, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, developed a hero that fooled everyone.

It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that these were the sons of Jewish immigrants and probably understood bitterly what it was like to be othered in an antisemitic environment. So they came up with a character that was superior to white people, and they've been worshipping him ever since. He was even given a motto, “Truth, Justice and the American Way,” and sent him to fight off Nazis during World War II, and the Ku Klux Klan, which actually helped to defeat the white supremacists in real life.

Siegel and Shuster likely realized then, as we know now, that people who come from other places are what makes America worth being in. Despite this, we’re in a comic book-style nightmare in which the Donald Trump regime is trying to expel anyone who has come here from another land, including naturalized citizens.

James Gunn himself said that his imagining of Superman is that of a person who came from elsewhere and only brings goodness to a world of greed, hatred and fear. He also knows that’s going to get him in trouble because there are people who absolutely loathe a narrative like that.

“I mean, Superman is the story of America,” Gunn told The Times in an interview. “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.

"But it’s about human kindness,” he continued, “and obviously there will be jerks out there who are just not kind and will take it as offensive just because it is about kindness. But screw them.”

Yeah, screw them.

Reality vs. Fantasy

With the passage of the Big Ugly Bill recently, $100 billion has been appropriated for el hielo, better known as ICE, making them in effect, federalized police with unchecked ability to pretty much do anything they want. With Trump’s sycophants running Congress and in the Supreme Court majority, along with the Legion of Doom operating as his cabinet, this modern Gestapo can roam unchecked and place human beings into gulags built by for-profit prison companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic.

In America’s fantasies, an undocumented alien is welcomed to solve all the world’s problems along with his metahuman friends (except for Batman, who is just really rich and smart). But in its reality, undocumented migrants are hunted by a real-life super villain who has spoken nothing but hatred for them for years.

Given his Supreme Court victory allowing him to subvert the 14th Amendment reversal ruling of the 1857 Dred Scott case and the 1898 Wong Kim Ark case, there is little reason to believe he will not move from undocumented aliens, to naturalized citizens – which he has already started – to people born on American soil, regardless of ethnic or racial background. If he decides he doesn’t like your ass, you could be on your way to Alligator Alcatraz.

On social media and the blogosphere, I even see certain people boast about having an indifferent attitude about ICE hunting foreigners, whether they are naturalized or undocumented. Believing that since this is currently impacting immigrants, Black people shouldn’t care. “It’s not our fight,” they say. That is not only defeatist, it’s naïve and dangerous.

The above mentioned GEO Group and CoreCivic are just two of many companies that have at least $1.5 billion in contracts in 2025 alone with the federal government to build not just detention facilities for Latinos, but for building prisons to house Black people, something they’ve been doing for generations. For them, it is not a separate fight. They are one large entity dedicated to waging war on nonwhite people in America and making a profit from it. If you think they regard you differently because your ancestors toiled on plantation soil, you are fooling yourself!

So when I do eventually view “Superman” I’m probably not going to see it with the wonder I had when I was a kid, watching Christopher Reeve swoosh across the screen, carried by a sense of destiny and John Williams’ iconic score. He’ll always be the Man of Steel to me (if you haven’t checked out “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story” on HBO Max, do yourself a favor and stream it).

What I am going to do is look at this superhero as Siegel and Shuster probably meant for us to see him, as a symbol of the goodness that can come from being different. Their message was that hope can come from far away, and that the true “American Way” is a path that leads from all over the world.

Madison Gray is a New York City-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in multiple publications globally. Reach out to him at madison@starkravingmadison.com.