The hit Broadway musical “Hamilton” has taken up the political fight again – this time at how immigrants are portrayed in America.
“It’s really astonishing that in a country founded by immigrants, ‘immigrant’ has somehow become a bad word.”
It’s one of the first lines of the song “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)” from the newly released Hamilton mixtape, a compilation of cover songs and samples off the musical recorded by various artists.
Without naming any names, “Immigrants” appears to take direct aim at President-elect Donald Trump’s controversial rhetoric on immigrants that became a center point of his campaign. Sung in both English and Spanish, the rap takes a line from the song “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)” in the musical, when Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette sing, “Immigrants, we get the job done,” and then launches in its own direction.
“You claim I’m stealing jobs though . . . Peter Piper claimed he picked them, he just underpaid Pablo. . . . But there ain't a paper trail when you living in the shadows”
It’s really astonishing that in a country founded by immigrants, ‘immigrant’ has somehow become a bad word.
From the song “Immigrants”
Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s creator and a son of immigrants, tweeted how much his parents identified with the song.