Sawt Falasteen - 'Desperation in the air': immigrant comics skewer Trump crackdown

"Are there any immigrants here? Or did we get rid of all of them?" German-born Pohl said, scanning the Friday night crowd at a New York comedy club's show called "Immigrant Jam."

Trump has overseen a sweeping crackdown on undocumented migration and alleges a link between migrants and crime -- something not backed up by any data.

New York's Democratic mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani calls Trump's aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency "a reckless entity that cares little for the law and even less for the people that they're supposed to serve."

But at the New York show, a band of foreign-born comics tried to see the bright side.

"We got a new mayor.... Who's happy?" Pohl said to cheers.

Pohl, who moved from Germany aged eight, told AFP she got into comedy during Trump's first term as president.

"I felt sad and sort of scared. I hadn't become a US citizen at that point," she said.

"Then this idea just came to me to have space to celebrate immigrants and do something where it's about joyful coming together, not a fearful coming together around immigrants."

- 'Darker' material -

A Colombian, a Bulgarian, and an Israeli were among the enthusiastic Friday evening crowd at Caveat, a small venue in Manhattan's Lower East Side.

"Now of course we are in a time where the rhetoric has been dialed up. Not only the rhetoric, but the government has taken such extreme actions against immigrants that I do feel there's more of a sense of urgency," Pohl said.

"Maybe the material has gotten darker."

Comic Jenny Tian from Australia said in her set that "to get here to perform for you guys... I had to spend two years doing paperwork proving myself as an artist. Proving my comedic abilities to your government. And I managed to get in."

Comic Lakshmi Kopparam, of Indian origin, was contacted by Pohl on social media and quickly became a hit fixture of the "Immigrant Jam" rotation, which is renewed from one night to the next, although some performers return regularly.

"So much of my material already has that (migrant) content in it, so it wasn't even like I had to manufacture it," she said.

In the heart of cosmopolitan New York, which recently elected a Muslim mayor, comedians get supportive audiences, and Pohl couldn't recall any heckling or hostility.

Martin Calles, an Argentinian in the US for 35 years, said American comedians "tend to talk about how they live in their parents' basements, and they do a lot of drugs."

"This is really more about, like, 'I took my citizenship test.'"

"Very relatable," he said.

When a German audience member told Pohl that he had just moved to the United States, the comedian responded, quick as a flash: "Why? Did you have to see how poor people without health care live?"

The jabs at Americans were never mean-spirited. But it was unclear whether the humor would translate elsewhere in the heavily polarized United States.

L.Hussein--SF-PST