How a Gypsy-Punk Music Video from 2010 Speaks to our Current Immigration Movement: Gogol Bordello’s “Imigraniada”
By Timothy Ryan
The blizzard of lies, disinformation, hatred and loathing unleashed by the Republican Party and its allies around immigration has been successful in skewing and obscuring the issue, all but destroying reasoned debate. It may seem odd then, even bizarre, to suggest one of the more incisive critiques of our current immigration dilemma actually comes from a gypsy-punk band named Gogol Bordello. In the song and video of “Immigraniada” from the “Before Times” of Obama in 2010, Ukrainian/Romany Eugene Hutz and his eclectic international band recorded some intense anthems that seemed to speak to our moment then – but even more so now.
One of their most incisive protest songs, “Immigraniada” (songwriter Hutz describes the title as a Spanish/Italian portmanteau rooted in “immigrant”, itself a verbal collision and mingling) dramatizes modern immigrants coming to America. The lyrics are more than a commentary, they’re a story, a narrative, laced with literary references but what immediately strikes the casual listener is the ferocity of the chorus. As befits a high-energy punk anthem, it sounds pretty damned threatening – “We’re coming rougher/We’re coming rougher/We’re coming rougher every time! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!” Without understanding a more complex unfolding immigrant experience, this sounds like it could feed a MAGA rally of energy vampires! To my amusement, when I showed the video to a close colleague of mine, a decades-long impassioned advocate and expert on international migration, she was initially aghast.
In watching the whole video of “Immigraniada,” however, you see how the art of a song is elevated by the video and vice versa – illuminating the work, in more ways than one. In this case, the bass starts up over the first grainy photo of immigrants from the 19th century staring at the Statue of Liberty in the distance, as splotches of blood begin to appear that take the shape of America.
The verses describe arriving and trying to get a job as we see Hutz and the band members working as dishwashers, waiters, textile workers, busboys, laborers, car washers, sweatshop garment workers. But it’s in the hardcore chorus that we visually connect to our history and stories, cutting to shots of silent film and poignant close-ups of the rough arrivals to Ellis Island c. 1900 (shades of Triangle Shirtwaist).
The song emphasizes the images from generations past as the visuals propel both the increasing difficulty in coming to America and the feeling of coming to the country “rough” every time when you have no choices, especially as a refugee:
All my life I pack, unpack
But man I got to earn this buck
I gotta pay representation
To be accepted in a nation
Where after efforts of a hero
Welcome, start again from zero
Cameos of contemporary immigrants from around the world, along with band members from China, Israel, Russia, Ecuador and Ethiopia accompanied by a map of their countries of origin in red blood swatches round out the video as Hutz sings the last verse about another turn in the cycle. He excoriates earlier immigrants who had an easier path to immigration and their rapidly assimilated entitlement who think they’ve got it made and look down on more recent “rougher” arrivals:
All those who made it and quickly jaded
To them we got nothing to say
Our immigrada, immigraniada
For them it’s Don Quixote’s kind of way
A salient element of this may be seen in the increase in Trump’s Latino vote despite his vitriolic dehumanizing of them, many of whom cite as a reason their own “legal” experience. This understandably includes those Latinos whose goal is assimilation, and there’s a long American tradition of obscuring one’s ancestors and reinventing one’s past. That assimilation is increasingly assuming the idea of Latinos being “white” so as to escape the censure and racism levied against others in their community. The self-righteous sensibility of Cubans and their families, for example, who often explicitly did not come here through the legal channels every other immigrant is obligated to follow, is an example of Hutz’s point. But this is true for many immigrant communities. A September 2024 Harper’s Bazaar article described the caste dynamics now among Indian immigrants through the filters of Brahmins Kamala Harris and Usha Vance, but its most obnoxious examples are Trump minions Vivek Ramaswamy and Kash Patel, nominated for FBI Director. Legislation was introduced in California to make caste-based discrimination, seemingly especially prevalent in the IT industry, illegal. Hutz is saying that many, discounting their own privilege, see only the foolishness of new immigrants’ far-fetched dreams, and often resent their lower-class/caste intrusion drawing attention to their own “Otherness” in white America.
But Hutz doesn’t discount the hopeful idealism that still drives people to come to this country. Quite the opposite. After slamming
corridors full of tear gas
Our destinies jammed every day
Like deleted scenes from Kafka
Flushed down the bureaucratic drain
the song drives home the fire of the immigrant’s aspirations, referencing Dylan’s 1964 classic “Chimes of Freedom”—
But if you give me the invitation
To hear the bells of freedom chime
To hell with your double standards
We’re coming rougher every time
The final verse reinforces the idea that immigrants bring literary and cultural investments with them, the importance of books and memory with references to Cervantes, Kafka, and Dylan. The Old World and the New. It is also an insistent plea, like a witness reaching out, a testimonial, as Hutz intones “It’s a book of our true stories, true stories that can’t be denied.” Then: “It’s more than true, it actually happened.” As Hutz insistently repeats this, it seems at first nonsensical until you also realize how relative “truth” has become especially in this debate turbo-charged with propaganda and disinformation that want to deny these stories, so he lands back on reality – it actually happened.
Irish Catholics. Gangs of New York. Italians. Jews on the lower east side. Mexicans. Harvest of Shame. Haitians. Springfield.
And when you consider the point is how almost everyone’s origin story is always coming rougher, it’s vital to preserve and remember that, even as new arrivals craft their own American narrative.
Here’s another lyric, from a “song” called “The Orange Weave”:
“These people are coming in
from Africa, from the Middle East. They’re coming in
from all parts of Asia, the bad parts, the parts
where they’re rough, and the only thing good
is they make our criminals look extremely nice.”
– Donald Trump, October 2024
If “Immigraniada” was speaking to a moment in 2010, it’s shouting at us now.
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