[This post is written by Becky Hawkins.]
This cartoon was born over gChat over a span of about 12 hours:
Becky: It’s wild how every “neat old photo” from an aggregate account on social media will have some egregiously racist comments…
There was a “1903 and now” photo of a street in lower Manhattan and someone was complaining that it’s “dirty” now that it’s Chinatown and not Little Italy (I guess they ignored the crowding and HORSES in the first photo?) Is it worth doing a cartoon about complaining about immigrants through the ages?
or does that fall under “ugh, not worth the argument”
Barry: No, that could definitely be a viable cartoon.
Would have to be careful not to come too close to repeating this one: https://leftycartoons.com/2008/10/09/history-marches-on-nativism-marches-in-place/
Becky: Maybe we could do the inverse where people are reminiscing about the good qualities of the previous generation of immigrants (eg pilgrims, Nordic, Italian…) and then futuristic people extolling how 21st century immigrants from Latin America contributed to the culture, unlike these Martians.
Barry: That’s a good idea!
Becky: Welp, you know I’d enjoy drawing it and have no interest in writing it
Barry: Okay, glad I have a place in the process. :-p
Becky: You mad bro?
* u mad bro?
I do love drawing cartoons where I have to set very specific, very clear scenes! I looked up a ton of photos and drawings of gentleman’s clubs so that I wasn’t copying one famous building. The antlers, bust, wainscoting, urn, and chairs were all from different places. During my search, I stumbled onto a cringeworthy website about how Rhodesia was good, actually. I usually don’t model political cartoon characters after specific people, but I snagged this picture from that website and the blond man in panel 1 is based on the third guy from the left.
If you zoom waaay in, the painting on the urn has a fountain, a lady in pink, and the sheep that I used to draw on my math tests for luck when I was in middle school, which I called the A-sheep.
Barry is a generous comic writer in that instead of scripting “a boardwalk in the 30s,” he wrote “the boardwalk in Miami. There are palm trees and ocean; in the distance, on the ocean, is a ship that might be the MS St Louis. (See reference folder)” The folder contained several old photos of boardwalks and the specific ship, which was a time-saver.
I spent way too long trying to get the right amount of ocean, boardwalk, and buildings in the panel, while still focusing on the women and ship. I settled for having a tiny peek of art deco in the background to make it Miami.
The outfit with the sash and turban came from this photo:
The forest in panel 3 is based on some photos I took near the Oregon coast. Off the walking trail, there are a lot of waist-high ferns with larger trees in between. Hopefully this looks detailed without looking cluttered.
In panel 4, it was Barry’s idea to have one Martian holding a map and the other Martian holding a baby. I drew different-colored stripes on the map to indicate bus or train routes. The futuristic human fashion in the last panel is based on my own misreading of the script. I got 2146 and 2046 mixed up, and figured that 22 years from now would be time for more 1990s throwbacks. Hence the fanny pack, bucket hat, and most of the outfit on the right. Hopefully the hover-shoes are futurey enough. I want to believe in a future with Doc Martens, whether they hover or not .
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has four panels, each showing a different scene in a different era.
PANEL 1
CAPTION AT TOP OF PANEL: 1871
Two wealthy-looking white Victorian men, middle aged and elderly aged, are sitting in armchairs in front of a fireplace in what looks like an expensive men’s club. One holds a glass of liquor, the other a cigar, as they talk to each other. In the background is a server with red hair, holding a tray with a bottle and glasses on it, and looking annoyed.
RICH GUY 1: We can’t let just anybody immigrate! The Irish are lazy and stupid!
RICH GUY 2: Better Irish than Chinese. I say keep ’em all out!
PANEL 2
CAPTION AT TOP OF PANEL: 1939
Two white women walk along the boardwalk. One woman is wearing a floppy hat, pearls, and a light purple dress, and is carrying a green umbrella to shield herself from the sun. The other woman is wearing a green sash and turban over a tan pantsuit. The second woman is pointing out to the ocean, where we can see a large ship which might be the MS St Louis.
SASH WOMAN: Even if Nazis are killing Jews – and we all know Jews lie – why is that our problem? We can’t afford thousands of Jews leeching off the rest of us!
PANEL 3
CAPTION AT TOP OF PANEL: TODAY
Two white women are walking through a park. One is wearing a broad hat, shorts, and carrying a backpack; the other is wearing a pink visor, and carrying a water bottle. In the background, a brown-skinned man carrying gardening shears watches them, not looking visibly annoyed but definitely aware of what they’re saying.
BACKPACK WOMAN: Central American “refugees” don’t want to work – they come here to live off welfare and crime!
PANEL 4
CAPTION AT TOP OF PANEL: 2146
Two people with ambiguous gender are standing. They’re wearing some sort of hover shoes, so they’re actually floating about a foot above the ground, with a yellow haze shooting out the bottom of their shoes. One is wearing a blue onesie with a wide futuristic looking yellow collar, along with a yellow hat and a fanny pack in front; the other is wearing a shawl over a crop top with lace trim, and a long green cargo skirt. The woman with the shawl is rudely pointing at a few obvious aliens (with tentacles instead of legs, gray skin, and huge black eyes) who are just a couple of feet away. One alien holds a map, which both of them are looking at, while the other is holding an alien baby.
LACE TOP WOMAN: Immigrants in the old days became good Americans. But these so-called “refugees” are lazy criminals! I say keep ’em out!
Are all the red haired people in the 2nd-4th panels the descendants of the butler in panel 1?
Right on point as always.
One thing I’m curious about: Panels 1,3, and 4 have immigrants who are obviously not causing harm the way the anti-immigrant folks say. Panels 1 and 3 have (presumably) Irish and Central American immigrants doing jobs that the anti-immigrant folks don’t want to do and take for granted.
Does panel 2 have something like that that I’m just not seeing? I see the boat, presumably with Jewish refugees.
Dianne: That wasn’t my intention, and I doubt it was Becky’s.
BCB: In panel 2, Jews are just represented by the boat. The boat is a drawing of the MS St Louis, which in 1939 was filled with 900 Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust. They were turned away by Cuba, Canada and the US, and in the end the MS St Louis had no choice but to go back to Europe. About a quarter of the Jewish passengers ended up dying in concentration camps. :-(
Random immigration facts: Somewhere between 1/5th and 1/4th of the doctors in the US are foreign medical graduates. So if all immigrants were deported, the US would lose 20-25% of its doctors. The soonest any of them could be replaced is seven years from the event, because it takes 4 years for medical school plus at least 3 (usually more) for residency*. Subspecialists would take at least another 3 years to replace. In the mean time, more US born doctors will retire or go to work for industry or government or just quit and do something else because working conditions would become intolerable. So maybe up to 1/3 of practicing doctors would disappear, at a rough estimate. Try getting an appointment after all that happens.
Not that it would matter, because most of us would starve in the Trump famine first. Because who, after all, harvests the food grown in the US? Oh, well, at least we could import food…or not given Trump’s trade policies.
So, why do more US-Americans trust Trump more than Harris on immigration (per WaPo)? This makes very little sense to me.
*Not counting the time and resources it would take to ramp up the size of medical school classes and/or increase the number of schools.
Dianne, is Trump proposing to deport all immigrants? I thought his proposal (which is ridiculous and cruel) was to deport all undocumented immigrants.
I was amused to learn, in a history of the Irish famine, that despite the Irish being canonised as “good immigrants” today, it was in fact extremely common practice for famine-driven immigrants to land at small beaches away from major ports, or to enter via Canada, to avoid a landing fee then imposed by the federal government on all immigrant-carrying ships.
So when the white heterosexual man with his Irish pride T shirt and green beer tells you that his immigrant ancestors came “the right way” they were probably undocumented, just like todays immigrants.
Barry @ 5: People who claim that immigrants are eating your pets and murdering your children aren’t going to stop at only those who are undocumented. They are the excuse for every problem and failure. The current statement may be only those who are undocumented, but it will expand as the economy collapses and Trump needs a scapegoat.
I mean, the immigrants that they’re saying are eating pets aren’t undocumented. They’re here legally and the community is really happy to have them.
Maybe that’ll be enough to tip Ohio… hahahahahahahaha! Who am I kidding.
@3
I saw the ship, and the link to the Wikipedia page in the description.
What I was referring to was how in Panel 3, the anti-immigrant characters say immigrants are lazy and don’t want to work, but the brown-skinned immigrant in the background is clearly doing a job that wealthy white people don’t want to do.
I was wondering if the 2nd panel contained any similar details which falsified what the antisemites were saying, specifically something which falsified the statement
However, now I realize that instead, you had the ship falsify the previous sentence
@Jacqueline
Don’t forget that , while the illegal aliens are in our neighborhoods eating cats, they are also in prison getting transgender surgeries.
One aspect of that claim that amuses me is that it (surprise!) contradicts Republicans’ usual talking-points about endocrine-related surgeries.
Usually, Republicans tell us that so-called “trans surgeries” are the most horrifying cruel and unusual punishment you can inflict on someone, and that anyone who gets such a treatment is “ruined” and will be miserable for the rest of their life.
Given Republicans’ stated support for torture and “tough on crime” rhetoric, and their unambiguous hatred for undocumented immigrants, you might think they’d be totally on board with inflicting this supposedly cruel torture on undocumented immigrants.
But instead, they are now claiming that endocrine-related surgery is actually a reward that President Harris is unfairly giving to undeserving criminal immigrants. Consistency doesn’t matter to them.
@Jacqueline: Ultimately the kind of red meat, from-the-gut politics Trump espouses doesn’t care for formal legalistic categories like ‘undocumented’ vs ‘documented’, or even ‘citizen’ vs ‘non-citizen’. To the extent that they employ these words, they’re not meant to differentiate people by their administrative status, but as ‘like us’ and ‘not like us’. ‘Us’ being white, male, christian or atheist, heterosexual and cisgender, of course.
I feel like there’s a lot of people here fighting strawmen the size of dragons.
Backing away from America for a second, to make the point:
Canada has taken in, on average, about 400,000 immigrants annually, trending up over time, regardless of party in power. And although we do have some illegal immigration, sometimes over the American border, sometimes via overstayed Visas, it’s orders of magnitude less of a problem here. Top to bottom: Our conversation here is orders of magnitude less toxic and loaded than yours.
But in the last two years, The Trudeau government, encouraged by the Century Initiative, has doubled Canadian immigration. We’re on track to take in a million immigrants this year. In a country of 40 million people. It’s funny… When I was growing up, Canada had about 35 million people, and America had about 350 million people. I used to 10x figures to compare the populations. You aren’t anywhere near 400 million now. We didn’t have a plan for that kind of growth. We don’t have homes for them to sleep in. Doctors for them to see. Schools for their kids to go to, and it is straining our systems so viciously that even if people don’t understand the nuance of the situation, they understand their pain, and they’re prepared to vote the Liberals out next year (or sooner, if an election is called). I have never in my life seen the Conservative Party of Canada at 45% support, more than the Liberals, NDP, and Green Party combined, but we are where we are because our infrastructure is bursting at the seams as a result of a *legal* immigration plan where we still have immigration standards.
There is obviously a limit, and going over that limit has consequences.
There’s always been A Number when we talk about immigration. Obviously some amount of immigration is necessary, healthy and otherwise good. But also obvious is that we can’t take in every immigration applicant that files their paperwork. And it’s been a constant pain point to determine what that number is. because not only do we have to have an opinion on what that number should be, but the people in power have to determine what the number of legal immigrants could be, juggling priorities, while remaining cognizant of the rates of illegal immigration. It would obviously be very disruptive to America if you actually deported all your illegal immigrants, because America has adjusted to their presence, perhaps even system breaking, which is why it hasn’t, and probably won’t ever happen. But I have the impression that legal immigration is hampered specifically because the authorities assume an amount of low-skilled labour is going to illegally immigrate. I’m going to go one step further and suggest that even if America deported all those illegal immigrants, some significant portion of offsetting legal immigrants would immediately be needed to take their place. Again… I don’t know what exactly that number is, but it’s obvious that the number is going to be in the millions.
Often, these conversations get simplified when it comes to arguing: “I want more”, “I want less”, “I want the illegals to get sent home”, but very few people are prepared to say their number, because they don’t know, necessarily, they just have opinions.
I can do that. For Canada, I think that there’s no need to take in any illegal immigrant, ever. They’re que-jumpers, and nothing pisses off Canadians quite like people unwilling to wait in line. That’s not to say there shouldn’t be a refugee process, but there’s a process for that too. Meanwhile, we’ve oversaturated the Canadian immigrant population to the tune of about a million immigrants so far. We obviously can’t start taking in zero immigrants, because there are skills that we desperately need… Particularly Doctors, but I think that we need to curb immigration steeply, perhaps as much as half of normal levels, for a number of years until we can adjust to our new size, which mathematically could be as many as six years, depending.
Does anyone want to articulate their plan for American immigration to a level of specificity that matches mine for Canada?
@Corso: I know it feels to you that nobody answers your demands for replies because nobody can stand up to the intellectual rigour of your conservative arguments, but I would like to introduce the idea that actually it´s because nobody feels the need to indulge your derrailing.
@Avvaaa: As a mostly lurker, I for one can say I appreciate that you and the other regular commenters are willing to respond only to the on-topic arguments and otherwise ignore Corso (and other commenters like them) who patently and routinely refuse to admit fault even and especially when they are clearly factually wrong and try to make the thread descend into a death spiral of “what-about-ism.” Thank you
@Avvaaa
Amp has said previously that he thinks that political cartoons are supposed to start conversation… But that conversation never seems to actually happen here except on the most thin of margins. If by “derailing” you mean “actually discussing the issues”, then sure, I’m derailing.
But could you maybe articulate what you think the rails are?
Because I don’t think that everyone here is incapable of these conversations, but I do think that this group is somewhat uniquely ideologically bubbled, and uses the forum as more of a safe space to sit back smugly and laugh at caricatures of their political opponents than to have those discussions.
I may have misunderstood the format.
@Corso: I can see you are enjoying have a conversation with yourself about how intellectually superior you are to the rest of us. Why should I do you the disservice of interrupting what is, I am sure, a very satisfying passtime for you?
And please don´t pretend you are interested in my opinion, it degrades us both.
Maybe I said that? I hope I didn’t. But let’s face it, I say a lot of things, and I’m not perfectly consistent, so sometimes I say things I disagree with.
But in general, “political cartoons are for starting a conversation” is a cliche that I disagree with.
Sure, some political cartoons are meant to start conversations, but not many.
As it happens, in the introduction to Kids Today Have Always Sucked, my most recent political cartoon collection, I addressed the “what is the purpose of political cartoons” question:
Please try to respect the space and not just outright attack other posters. Chances are the person you’re making most uncomfortable isn’t the person you’re attacking, but me.
FAKE NEWS! I bet if I dig through every comment you’ve ever made I could selectively-quote something to make it sound like you claim you are perfectly consistent!
According to this site, about 1 in 4 people in Canada is or was an immigrant. I’ll agree that’s a lot. But looking at the time trends, it looks to me like there was a big jump in 2006-2011 and 2011-16 when Harper was PM (except for 2016, so I suppose the jump could all have happened in 2016, but it seems highly unlikely.) So as far as immigration to Canada can be attributed to a PM’s policies, it looks like both the Conservatives and the Liberals have been encouraging immigration. Given that the unemployment rate in Canada is around 5%, a Trumpian stopping of immigration would be a disaster with a sudden and severe shortage of workers.
Well, heck. Let me make it easy.
I, Amp, am perfectly consistent. Always and forever.
I laughed quite loudly when I read that comment and I couldn’t explain to my mom what I was laughing at:P