The future of the factory in Sleep Dealer...
The future of the factory in Sleep Dealer... Maya Entertainment

The cinema of this millennium's first decade gave us three great science fiction films: District 9, Children of Men, and Sleep Dealer. The last two weren't box-office hits, though both were much better than the first film, Neill Blomkamp's District 9 (2009). The second film, Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men, is only now getting some attention because it's producing lots and lots of unexpected echoes as it moves through our moment. That movie turns out to be a dub for an event that hadn't happened when it was made in 2006: Brexit. Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer is also generating echoes with our times. Set in the near future, the 2008 film is about a young Mexican man, Memo (Luis Fernando Peña), who leaves his village—which has been destroyed by US drones—to work in a strange factory in a border city. Trump's wall has been built, and no poor Mexican citizen can even dream of entering the US. The "fucken" wall is not only tall but militarized.

But the US still needs Mexican labor. The solution is found in the strange factories around the border town. The Mexican men and women who work in these complexes do not actually make things (or at least, not directly), but instead, plug into a network that links them with robots in the US. They ensoul these machines, which pick fruit, care for children, and construct corporate towers and suburban homes across the border. With ensouling—which, in this future time, is still cheaper and more developed than artificial intelligence—the brown swamping problem is solved. The US can remain mostly white and still benefit from cheap labor.

Trump, however, cannot solve the labor/swamping problem because there's nothing in the world he rules that's like the robots in Sleep Dealer. What is he, and the white existential fear he represents, to do? Get physical: expel the labor and, by demographic force, make America white again. If this sounds too ridiculous to you, and you really believe there is some other more rational reason for Trump's immigration policies, then you have underestimated the depth and resilience of the roots of American whiteness.