Lumber Company Runs Super Bowl Ad Praising Illegal Immigration

Kyle Smith asks if the company is trying to recruit illegal workers with the illegal-alien friendly ad.

Uplifting and patriotic ads are a staple of the Super Bowl, so last night the astonishing cynicism of that 84 Lumber ad really stood out. “Come on, illegal immigrants: Risk your lives, drag yourself across the harshest terrain and endure the most agonizing hardships. We need the cheap labor!”

In the 90-second spot for the construction-materials company, a Latino mother and daughter who are apparently sneaking across the southern border of the U.S. rise in the dark, walk along a barbed-wire fence, clamber aboard the boxcar of a moving train and wade across a river.

In the full-length, six-minute version, which the company said was rejected by Fox for being too political, the mother and daughter are despondent when they encounter an enormous wall in the desert. Then the little girl presents the mom with a crude American flag she has assembled from scraps of plastic bags, and the pair discover a gigantic set of doors in the wall. They proceed to stroll right through.

The ad is an unmistakable invitation to lawbreaking from a building-supplies company that, because of the industry it represents, is strongly associated with illegal immigrants. A Pew survey conducted between 2007 and 2012 found that construction was the sector that employed the second-largest number of illegal immigrants, after the service industry...

The owner of the firm, Maggie Hardy Magerko, made it clear that Brunner was taking his cues from her when she told KDKA, "We're casting a wider net. We want the world to know 84 Lumber is the place for people who don't always fit nicely into a box."

That sounds sort of like recruiting.

Ed Driscoll notes at Instapundit that the ad is getting a lot of negative reaction, with the owner of the firm -- "casting a wider net" -- now claiming she voted for Trump. Seems strange.

posted by Ace at 06:59 PM

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