Let’s be real: immigration is not a game. It’s a grueling, emotional, years-long journey filled with bureaucracy, uncertainty, and the kind of real-life stakes no reality show can truly simulate.
So when a producer best known for Duck Dynasty and The Millionaire Matchmaker pitches a reality competition series — The American — where immigrants compete in “American” challenges like mining for gold or assembling a Model T for a shot at U.S. citizenship, it’s not a bold innovation. It’s a deeply troubling signal about how little we respect the people who build their lives waiting for the promise of America.
To be fair, The American’s creator Rob Worsoff — himself an immigrant from Canada — insists that the series is meant to be uplifting. He wants it to celebrate the process, not parody it. And he says outright: “NOBODY in this show will move backwards in the citizenship process.”
But that doesn’t mean it’s not exploitative.
When the premise of your show is literally “immigrants competing to become citizens,” you’re not just staging stunts. You’re commodifying identity. You’re putting people — many of whom have fled persecution, poverty, or war — into a spectacle, asking them to prove their worth in front of a TV audience, all while performing themed obstacle courses and patriotic trivia.
It’s Survivor: Ellis Island. The Amazing Race for a Green Card. It’s not a celebration. It’s a sideshow-a step closer to The Hunger Games or Maze Runner.
Worse, it plays directly into the dangerous myth that immigrants must “earn” their right to belong through some performance of Americanness — that they must wave a flag harder, sing the anthem louder, and crush a pie-eating contest better than the rest of us. As if the woman cleaning hotel rooms to send her kid to school hasn’t already proven something. As if the man waiting ten years for a visa isn’t showing enough commitment.
Let’s also not ignore the timing. This show is being pitched amid a political climate where immigration remains one of the most weaponized issues in America. When the Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Kristi Noem is reportedly spending millions on “leave now” ads targeted at undocumented immigrants, turning around and greenlighting a reality competition on “earning” citizenship sends a mixed — and frankly insulting — message.
Yes, reality TV can tell powerful human stories. And Worsoff is right: not all of it is mean-spirited. But the format matters. The premise matters. And when the thing on the line is national identity, safety, and status under the law, no amount of feel-good editing can soften the underlying truth: you’ve turned the most sacred rite of passage in America into ratings bait.
There’s a reason the Constitution doesn’t come with a confetti cannon.
Want to celebrate immigration? Great.
Tell the stories of families reuniting after decades.
Tell the stories of Dreamers graduating from college.
Tell the stories of the quietly heroic, everyday immigrants who already make this country better, not because they won a footrace across the desert or built a statue out of hot dogs on a game show stage, but because they worked, and waited, and believed.
America should be a place that honors those stories, not one that demands people audition for citizenship like it’s American Idol. We already ask immigrants to jump through enough hoops.
Let’s not ask them to do it in front of a studio audience.
REELated:
DHS considering reality competition series for U.S. citizenship
