The super PAC founded by filmmaker Joss Whedon gives a speculative look at what this election day will look like for undocumented immigrants and their families ― and it’s bleak.
Save the Day PAC, which Whedon launched last month to encourage people to vote, posted the video on Wednesday along with several others.
The short, called “Verdict,” features a little girl’s family and other people who appear Latino going about their lives on Election Day as they wait for the results. The film doesn’t predict a result, but ends on the little girl tugging on an adult’s arm after a newscaster says the election has been called.
“Can we stay?” she asks.
It’s a fairly common strategy to use children in campaign ads. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has made an featuring a young girl whose parents are undocumented.
This ad highlights something that’s very true about this election: there are huge stakes for undocumented immigrants and their families, given Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s promise to carry out intensive immigration enforcement and drive out anyone without authorization to be in the country. That means 11 million people, most of whom have family here, often U.S.-born citizen children.
None of the characters in the ad are explicitly said to be undocumented, although the young girl’s question implies at least some of them are. There’s a not-so-subtle framing of them as hard workers and good citizens. One woman rises at 4 a.m. to go to work as a housekeeper, a family runs a taco truck and a disabled veteran speaks to a class.
Trump is trailing Clinton with Latino voters by huge margins ― 50 points, according to a NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Telemundo poll released earlier this month. That’s particularly significant since there are a projected 27.3 million Hispanic Americans eligible to vote this year.
Surveys have shown that most Latino registered voters rank immigration fourth in importance, behind education, jobs and the economy and health care.
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