I posted this a day or so ago elsewhere on social media, before seeing the new movie.

Superman is not an illegal immigrant in any meaningful sense of the word. He is a made-up fantastic entity, who does not fit in any definitions of the real world. If you have to make an analogy, his closest comparable situation is a foreign-born infant adopted by American parents.

The issue with immigrants is that they are not from a geographically removed place, but that they are born into a different culture, under different rules and ideas, and at one time owed allegiance to another state, and while a lot, perhaps even the vast majority, of people cast those things off as best they could with the good faith intention to embrace America & its culture, it’s impossible to tell them from those who retain their old allegiances and loyalties in their hearts. Even the immigrants themselves can’t honestly say how they might react when their loyalties were put to the test.

Rules about immigration were put in place, because the founding fathers did not want monarchists coming over and sabotaging the republic in its cradle by voting in kings, or taking the highest office in the land, as commander-in-chief of all armed forces, which is the position from which every monarchy ever was founded. And then, as foreigners developed other bad ideas to replace monarchies, we didn’t want that, either. (Or their foreign germs. Yes, foreigners have germs. That’s why it took until the invention of vaccines before civilization penetrated sub-Saharan Africa, and why the Europeans found so much empty land available as they started spreading out in North America. But that’s not relevant to Superman, I don’t read the picture books, so I have no idea what the official pseudoscience is going on there, but I could headcanon some reasonable explanations)

Anyway, the point is, Superman is not from some godawful hellhole like Russia or Scotland or Canada or whatever. He is from no place on Earth except the United States of America. The first air he breathed in this world was in Kansas. His first steps were on American soil. His mother-tongue is American English. He grew up knowing no other identity or allegiance except that of an American from Kansas. If you want to try calling him an illegal alien because of his parents’ failure to fill out some paperwork, that’s inaccurate as well, because there is no legal status or rule for his particular situation. Jonathan and Martha could not fill out the paperwork identifying Clark as born anywhere else, because the US do not recognize the existence of his place of conception, and, in fact, it no longer existed*. But they could truthfully state that he had not been born in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, South America, Central America, any island between them, Mexico, or Canada.

*Tangent here: IDK how that ship thing traveled to Earth, but the OG movie showed it flying through physical space, meaning slower than the speed of light, and not utilizing any extra-spatial methods to get from Krypton to Earth. This suggests he was kept in some sort of suspended animation, or greatly slowed metabolic state, to still be a toddler when he arrived on Earth. Because since Krypton was in a different solar system than Earth, that means Clark is technically older than the country, given the amount of time it would have taken to travel from even the closest star to here. If Krypton orbited Proxima Centauri, and the ship was 100x the speed of Voyager 1, his voyage began sometime in the medieval era.

In fact, Superman is the least deserving of the term “immigrant” of absolutely anyone. Every other human being in the USA is descended from foreigners who, at some point, came here. Sorry Indians & “First Nations (you weren’t first, just the first ones white people encountered; a better term would be ‘Penultimate Nations’)”, you’re just as much 'immigrants’ (technically colonists) as the rest of us, and any claims based on seniority, in principle, support nativist positions in the current immigration debates. Go back far enough on any American’s family tree and you will find people born in some lesser land or second-tier continent. Clark Kent alone can say his blood ancestors never lived anywhere else on Earth. No one likes to admit it these days, for some reason, but for most of his published history, Superman’s motto was “truth, justice & the American way.”

Superman’s Kryptonian heritage is an abstract datum that he discovered as an adult, and Kryptonian culture, ideas, values and associations had no influence on him growing up. Even his powers, while directly attributable to his Kryptonian biology, are due to his human upbringing on the planet Earth. He is Superman precisely because he lives on Earth. Krypton is literally toxic to him.

Part of the annoying thing about the Snyder films (aside from the writing quality in general) is their insistence upon Superman’s Kryptonian heritage. Seeing him as a Kryptonian was Batman’s error, and Luthor’s crime. But the people who wrote those scripts didn’t even seem to realize what they were doing, when they had a well-meaning guy who’d lost his way, and a psychotic monster both seek his destruction for being Kryptonian, and then Diana of Themiscyra (herself a filthy foreigner, who chose to live in France, of all places) tries to remind him of his humanity by addressing him as “Kal El”. You can tell Bruce Wayne (American, industrialist, inventor, rugged individualist, anti-crime activist, self-defense practitioner & prepper) is the brains of the group, or has at least learned from his mistake, because he brings in Clark Kent’s partner to do what Diana’s invocation of his Kryptonian name (or her foreign witchcraft) fails to accomplish.

Superman doesn’t belong to anyone (and it’s deeply, deeply stupid to try to claim fictional characters for any cause in a political or ideological discussion). He is not an immigrant, and nativists have no business claiming him as one of their own, because they themselves fall short of his standard. Which is true in general, of any area in which his actions incline toward a particular way. You can’t claim his actions are analogous to your favored policy, because he’s better than you. What you want to do, following his example, you would fuck up, because you’re not Superman. Just STFU and enjoy the damn movie (or hate on it if it sucks as badly as my experience of James Gunn’s work, plus the state of current cinema, leads me to fear it might), even if you can’t accurately claim him for your side in whatever socio-political drama you are currently embracing to alienate yourself from your fellow humans.