Music

Stop What You’re Doing And Watch Riz Ahmed’s ‘Hamilton’ Immigrant Anthem

"Immigrants — we get the job done."

by Meg Watson  29 June 2017
Riz Ahmed

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If you only know Riz Ahmed from his recent star-making turns in The Night Of and Rogue One, you are missing out on some seriously good Riz Ahmed. The British-Pakistani cutie is also a sick rapper and activist; he’s one half of the hip hop duo Swet Shop Boys, and last year teamed up with K’NAAN, Snow Tha Product, and Residente for a track on the The Hamilton Mixtape.

Now, Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda has released a video for the song, ‘Immigrants (We Get The Job Done)’ and it’s everything you could possibly want it to be. The clips features immigrants hustling in sweatshops and kitchens and hospitals and staring point blank at the camera; a bunch of direct statements about Trump’s America, a cameo from Hamilton star Daveed Diggs; and even a sneaky Star Wars reference from Riz (“British Empire strikes back”).

If this is the first time you’ve heard the song, it was inspired by a line in Hamilton‘s ‘Yorktown’. The rest of the album featured similarly related tracks from the likes of The Roots, Usher, Sia, Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys, Chance The Rapper and more.

Speaking to BuzzFeed News today, the video’s director Tomas Whitmore said it had an obvious resonance within today’s political climate. “It felt like a really unique opportunity to give a voice to the immigrant narrative, and to shine a spotlight on, as the song says, ‘America’s ghost writers’,” he said. “There are a lot of people that make this country great and that we don’t often get to see in mainstream media.”

The film’s producer Robert Rodriguez added, “It’s really astonishing that in a country founded by immigrants, ‘immigrant’ has somehow become a bad word… This helps reclaim it and put back in perspective that this is a land of immigrants. It should be celebrated.”

This also comes in the same week Lin-Manuel Miranda launched #Ham4All, a charity campaign that asks people to donate cash to an immigrants rights coalition and also share videos of themselves singing Hamilton songs. Not everyone can be quite as good as Riz Ahmed, but they’re still pretty cute: