Director Chris Weitz didn’t just make one of the best movies of 2011 with his tender exploration of the lives of undocumented immigrants, A Better Life. The process of making the film turned him into a dedicated advocate for immigration reform, reconnecting with his Mexican heritage and studying Spanish and economics so he can be a more effective advocate. And now Weitz has taken his experience in fiction and turned it to fact, directing a series of immigration reform ads pegged to Alabama’s insanely restrictive immigration law, for a coalition of groups that includes the Center for American Progress. I think this one is my favorite:

The whole campaign is doing a very good job of showing the harm that restrictive immigration laws cause to non-immigrants, whether they’re older white men who are close friends with undocumented families or black Alabamans who see hatred of immigrants as part of the unfulfilled promise of the Civil Rights movement. So-called special interests have such wider reach than we often acknowledge.

Continuing the science-fiction-as-class metaphor, with a soupçon of immigration, is the gorgeous-looking, and yet mysteriously distributor-less Upside Down:

There’s a pretty clear emerging pattern in science fiction movies of physical boundaries between classes. In Time had the zoned checkpoints that Justin Timberlake has to cross through, the border fee he pays escalating at every checkpoint. These aren’t just basic visa fees: he’s got to prove that he’s got time to burn, or at least that he wants to be there badly enough to spend part of his life to pay for the crossing. When he comes into possession of a million years, the movie becomes a story about trade and monopolies. It’s not just frightening to the ruling class that the years get out into other districts, it’s that the borders themselves are permeable.

It looks like the same will be true in Upside Down. I’ll be curious to see how the boundaries between the two worlds are physically controlled (it looks like it’s a matter of finding inflection points and making the conceptual leap that allows you to realize you can walk on the ceiling), but there’s no question it’s important. The Boarder Patrol actually goes by the same name in these worlds and our own, and is clearly willing to try to prevent that conceptual realization and those crossings by force.

In both movies, there are two clear reasons that the ruling classes don’t want the borders they’ve set up to be permeable. In both cases, they’ve built beautiful, controlled worlds that they don’t want disturbed by the presence of uncouth members of the lower classes. They have beautiful things, and they don’t want to share. But in both movies, the goal is also to make sure no one realizes the borders can be crossed, that resources can be redistributed, that the system everyone lives isn’t a natural and immutable condition.

I wonder if that’s a more important message for privileged people than for the people who want to cross borders, though. It’s not like Mexican immigrants, or gay binational couples don’t already know that the system is rotten, and aren’t working to subvert it, whether they’re continuing to make border crossings irrespective of the danger or lobbying to get laws changed. It’s the folks who think that borders can be entirely secured, that we can preserve some kind of purified society, who need the lesson.

I’ve sung the praises of A Better Life here before, but I really think that to appreciate it, you should watch it with Miss Bala, a terrific movie out of Mexico based on the true story of a beauty queen who became the pawn of a drug cartel. As I explain in The Atlantic this week:

In Carlos’s case, the efficient machinery set up by the United States government to deport undocumented workers has essentially no room for appeal. The volunteer lawyer who visits him recognizes that Carlos has all the makings of a solid citizen, but none of the resources to fight for an incredibly rare exemption to the rules that say he must be returned to Mexico. The most the system can bend is to give Carlos a moment with his son before shipping the gardener off in shackles.

If a state with something to offer citizens its citizens can afford this kind of callousness, a state that couldn’t care less about its people can be all the more harsh and arbitrary. And it turns out not to matter to the Mexican government that Laura’s been coerced, threatened with death, and raped. Treating her as a collaborator with the cartel makes for a more interesting news story, so after she tips off a powerful general of a coming attack, she’s imprisoned, trotted out before the news cameras, and ultimately abandoned on the streets of Baja California

Miss Bala is a great, unnerving story about Mexico, but it’s also a fascinating antidote to the Strong Female Character trope. Laura does tremendously brave things, and survives through intense violence, but instead of a cool, detached competence, we feel the terror that would be ours if we found ourselves in the same situation. There’s a morality to feeling the horror of the bad things you do to stay alive because you have no other choice.

.

This seems…worrisome, and not just because it’s a retread of the lengthy philosophical debates that made the first half of this season of The Walking Dead drag:

That’s concept art for Rick, the lead character in Dead Rising 3 on the right. He’s an orphan and works as an auto mechanic. When the zombie apocalypse breaks our Rick is unsure of himself, so he isn’t the same kind of character like Frank West. His plan is to restore a plane and escape Los Perdidos before a bomb goes off and destroys the already ruined city. As a player, getting the plane to fly is one of your main goals.

One interesting tidbit a source tells Siliconera, is Dead Rising 3 has an undercurrent of themes about illegal immigration. Another character called Red leads an underground group of “illegals,” which are infected people that aren’t registered by the government. Annie, Red’s girlfriend is a runaway that’s sympathetic to the infected. While some survivors are helpful, others went berserk. One of the psychopaths you fight is a biker gang member who drives a “Roller Hog” – that’s a motorcycle with a steam roller attached to the front.

It’s a good thing to have a character who’s sympathetic to the characters who are stand-ins for undocumented immigrants. But I’m not sure it’s exceptionally productive to have as a premise the idea that people with diverse motivations for taking a tremendous risk are a diseased horde who ought to be registered with the government. There’s no question that there are big forces that motivate people to come here by means other than the legal process, ranging from economic opportunities in the United States to instability in Mexico. But being acted on big forces doesn’t mean that the decision to come here illegally is any less of an individual choice.

The most productive way to talk about a workable immigration reform solution seems, to me at least, to balance a discussion of those forces with an insistence that we see immigrants themselves as people on their own terms. It’s a lie to paint all undocumented immigrants as dangerous offenders just because they non-violently broke laws to come to the United States. And it’s not really productive or sustainable to insist that all undocumented immigrants are saints—no community or collection of communities can live up to that kind of weight. This metaphor may try to break down the assumptions behind the metaphor, but the construction of the metaphor isn’t wildly helpful in the first place.

I’m on record as thinking Men In Black is pretty wonderfully progressive about immigration, focusing on assimilation and accommodation rather than demonization. So I was already prepared to love Ugly Americans when I watched the first season this weekend. Mark Lilly, the main character, is the inverse of Will Smith’s agent in every way: he’s a social worker rather than an asskicking cop, a slightly out-of-shape white guy rather than a sleekly-dressed sexual specimen, a guy who’s dating a demon who is totally out of his league rather than engaging in unexpected flirtation with a nerdy-yet-alluring mortuary worker. Given how good the show is at riffing on its immigration metaphor, as Lilly tries to help vampires, disembodied brains, and pumpkin-headed aliens into New York society, it’s almost a shame that it keeps veering off into parodies of things like reality television, which now seems like it’s a mandatory stop for any sitcom, animated or no.

Ugly Americans is an almost perfect example of the power of substitution and juxtaposition humor, particularly when the show is riffing on anti-Semitism. When Mark finds his law enforcement colleague, Frank Grimes, harassing a squid by exposing him to the air even though the squid has papers, Mark puts a stop to it, snapping “I know they look the same to you, but I happen to have been at this squid’s bar mitzvah.” The joke works because it’s not like squid are coded Jewish, so it’s a very silly line delivered with intense sincerity, but it also gives the squid an immediate context, not just in humanity, but in a specific corner of it. Later, Grimes complains of vampires that “They control the television news, the press, and the weather,” taking the paranoia a step further in a way that reinforces the mythical power of the universe. And later, when Mark’s zombie roommate Randall gets on a reality show, one of his faerie roommates titters in confessional that “I totally have a crush on Randall, but my dad would kill me if he found out he’s not Jewish.” It’s a line that’s as much about the persistence of the differences that we cling to, their power even in a world where we’d have potentially more substantial things to worry about.

The show’s also very good on the question of employment for immigrants, and the power of state bureaucracies. King Kong, as it turns out, is depressed over a wrongful termination. “I was hired to clean the Empire State Building and that’s all I was doing. When can I get my job back?” A human parking attendant apologies for one of her employees, a troll, telling human customers “I’m so sorry, sir. He’s a diversity hire. That’ll be $4.75. And zip up your vest. This is a work environment.” Later, when he’s fired, the troll becomes fodder for a reality television stunt. Mark’s clients aren’t just vulnerable to their employers—they’re vulnerable to him and Frank, too. “What say you to a trip to the Natural History Museum to visit the man-bird exhibit?” Mark asks enthusiastically at a citizenship class. “Technically, he can have us deported!” one of his clients warns another before they answer. In another episode, a family of pumpkin-headed creatures tells trick-or-treaters that “We don’t celebrate that vile and racist holiday,” only to have a militant Frank pop up, declare “It’s called Halloween!” and threaten the family into giving the kids candy.

Ugly Americans doesn’t really shy away from the weirdness of its aliens, it accepts that just as it might be somewhat weird to find your zombie roommate sleeping with a disembodied brain, big turnovers in neighborhoods and influxes of new customs might bring some discomfort along with them. What it doesn’t accept is that such discomfort should be permanent, or impossible to overcome. It’s a respectful, useful position. Integrating immigrants into American society involves work both for the people who are coming and the folks who are already hear. But just because it involves work doesn’t mean it’s not worth it.