You’re not wanted here!” “Go home!”
No, not the reproaches of immigration officers as they set about deporting incoming Iranian PhDs or Iraqi grandmas as per the instructions of Donald Trump’s travel ban, but a beer commercial with attitude. Super Bowl Sunday, at once the holy grail of sports and mass advertising, is upon us. With a television audience of over 100m Americans as its target, and with a reckless disregard for the voting preference of countless Budweiser drinkers, the mega-brewer Anheuser-Busch has produced a slick one minute immigrant odyssey: the story of its founder Adolphus Busch coming to St Louis in the 1850s.
Lest it be accused of liberal sentimentality, the ad comes with a title worthy of a Bruce Willis action movie: “Born the Hard Way.” Production values are high, and even the plot of the micro-movie grips. Our hero suffers a grim voyage and routine abuse before meeting his destiny, a handshake with one Herr Anheuser. The commercial has to have been made long before the immigration ban and its spectacular blowback in street and airport demonstrations. But the ad is now seen by both sides to the debate as a deliberate effort to define America as, above all, a nation of immigrants — the title of President Kennedy’s book.