Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda has been inspired by the many signs he's seen at anti-Trump protests over the past two weeks that quote his show's lyric "Immigrants, we get the job done." In a new interview with The Huffington Post, he calls the president's temporary immigration ban, "deeply un-American."
“I keep seeing ‘Immigrants, We Get The Job Done’ on placards at every march, at every protest. I can’t tell you what that does to me as a writer to see a line [I wrote]. And what it means for the conversation, in this moment in history,” Miranda said Thursday (Feb. 2), reacting to President Trump's controversial order that bars immigration from seven majority-Muslim nations for 90 days. In addition to his feeling that the order is "un-American," the Oscar-nominated actor/singer/songwriter said it is "against the fundamental freedom of religion in our constitution.
Because of the tension and anger the president's order has elicited among so many Americans -- who flooded the nation's major airports last weekend in protest -- Miranda encouraged citizens to keep fighting back, encouraging them to use his lyrics as their verbal weapons.
“There was an incredible protest sign that read ‘History Has Its Eyes On You’ and it had Carrie Fisher as Leia’s eyes over it, and I was so moved by the moment,” he said. “When you’re making something, you don’t control what happens [in response]. You can only control the thing you make. So to see it ripple back in that way, it’s very moving and very humbling.”
One of the most frequently quoted statistics over the past week comes from a Sept. 2016 Cato Institute report, which determined in a study that the "chance of an American being murdered in a terrorist attack caused by a refugee is 1 in 3.64 billion per year." The study found that "of the 3,252,493 refugees admitted from 1975 to the end of 2015, 20 were terrorists, which amounted to 0.00062 percent of the total. In other words, one terrorist entered as a refugee for every 162,625 refugees who were not terrorists. Refugees were not very successful at killing Americans in terrorist attacks. Of the 20, only three were successful in their attacks, killing a total of three people."
Not a single refugee has been implicated in a terrorist attack since the Refugee Act of 1980 established strict procedures for accepting refugees into the country, the report noted.
Miranda also made a pitch to help support the National Endowment for the Arts, which Trump has vowed to defund. “The importance of the NEA ― I can not tell you how many studies and findings find that arts lift up every other score in education,” he said. “When you learn music, you use both hemispheres of your brain. It helps you with the math and it helps you with the arts. It’s so important that the arts have attention in our education. It certainly saved my life. I don’t know where I would be without the amazing arts education I got at a public school. I certainly wouldn’t be talking to you. So, we’re going to have to fight to protect it.”