By:  Timothy Sutton, Communications Editor

Neil Rivas, a Latino artist in the San Francisco Bay area has created a series of immigrant status parodies on America’s most beloved comic book superheroes. The Ramp Gallery at the SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco that displays a hallway lined with Rivas’s parodies, which urge viewers to call ICE agents on heroes such as Superman, Wolverine, and Wonder Woman. Each poster sites the immigrant origins of the heroes and their undocumented status.

The exhibit highlights the gravity of loss our country would incur if we strictly applied our current immigration policies. What would our world be without Clark Kent or the scruffy Canadian Wolverine? I took the parody a step further considering my America without immigrants:

Without immigrants many of our favorite foods, like artichokes, would not be available. Were it not for the French and Italian American immigrants, the artichoke would not have found its home in California. Further, the “hand-labor” required by the agriculture industry relies heavily on immigrant, temporary, and even undocumented workers to survive. Not thrive, but merely survive.

The recent wave of state legislation denying rights to undocumented immigrants has greatly contributed to the growing social unrest with our current immigration politics. NBC News recently reported that a US permanent resident is currently locked up in Etowah County Detention Center because he mistakenly marked his status on a motorcycle driver’s license application “US Citizen.” The social and financial costs of our broken immigration systems are magnified even more by the speed and breadth of our modern communication mediums and social networks.

The ACLU recently challenged the validity of an Alabama state law that required immigration checks for school students; the Eleventh Circuit ruled they imposed a “significant interference with the children’s right to education” and therefore violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution. The general public is becoming increasingly sensitive to how theses secular immigration laws impact civil rights. “Illegal Super Heroes” is a perfect example of how current immigration issues have moved out of the legal and political realm into American’s daily lives.

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