Federal agencies are posting what clearly deserves to be labeled propaganda on X.com, sugar-coating President Donald Trump’s efforts to privilege white males and demonize immigrants with a glaze of traditional American imagery.
Exhibit A: The U.S. Department of Labor’s posts touting “Project Firewall,” a program to tighten enforcement on the H-1B program that grants visas to skilled workers from overseas. The images mimic, and in some instances copy, nostalgic World War II–era posters.
H-1B visas have gone mainly to computer-savvy Indians and Chinese with master’s degrees, according to Pew Research Center. It’s not a bad idea to make sure corporate America doesn’t abuse the program, and to “ensure American Workers have a fair shot at the American Dream,” as the Labor Department put it in an October 21 post. But the social-media campaign proffers only job candidates who are handsome, broad-shouldered white males, posed resolutely in sunny industrial settings.
My son-in-law, Geoff Bowser, compiled the Labor Department’s Project Firewall posts from X, then brought his research to the public’s attention with his own social-media posts. Neil Steinberg, a columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, took note of his post, which reached a broad audience, and wondered if the Labor Department could “really be representing America as a white man and only a white man, with no minorities in sight, and women, who make up half the work force, delegated to gazing with adoration at a daughter—in a pink bonnet!—at church?”
One of the images is borrowed from an advertisement the Lee Rubber & Tire Corporation of Conshohocken, Pennsylvania placed in the August 1944 issue of Fortune magazine, an idyllic illustration of a (white) family of four looking toward a suburban home, a school, a white-spired church, and a factory. A true picture of employment in that period would show that women played a huge role in the rubber industry, which was vital to the war effort. They would soon be laid off.
Bowser, an attorney living in Brooklyn, also took the time to curate another illustrative collection of Trump administration posts on X: images that twist the Statue of Liberty into service as a nativist icon. DHS mimics wartime recruiting posters to attract new employees to its Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services units.
When President Grover Cleveland inaugurated the Statue of Liberty in 1886, he spoke of the colossus as “keeping watch and ward before the open gates of America,” not a “fierce and war-like god, filled with wrath and vengeance” but a deity who “holds aloft the light which illuminates the way to man’s enfranchisement.”
For the Trump administration, Liberty is about disenfranchising, and prospective federal employees are being sought in that spirit. Liberty carries a sword or shield, a warrior goddess. The government’s manipulation of the image follows in the nativist tradition of misappropriating Lady Liberty, which began soon after she arrived.
USCIS hires asylum officers to make what are sometimes life-or-death determinations of whether immigrants would face persecution in their homelands. Their mandate from Trump is to “Safeguard Americanism.”
Another DHS post recruits USCIS employees by misusing Norman Rockwell’s 1946 painting Working on the Statue of Liberty, depicting workers high atop the torch. DHS adds a slogan that chills the nostalgic warmth of Rockwell’s work: “Protect Your Homeland. Defend Your Culture.” The late artist’s family said it hadn’t authorized DHS’s use of the painting. In a USA Today op-ed, the family said that Rockwell “would be devastated” to see that his work “has been marshaled for the cause of persecution toward immigrant communities and people of color.”
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