CROSSPOST: IAN McKELLEN: William Shakespeare (& Other Playwrights) on Thomas More on Immigrants
On “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”. Immigration, Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Thomas More, ICE, Minneapolis, Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, & Senator Collins’s little carve-out for Maine from the ICE...
On “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”. ““Grant Them Removed”: Immigration, Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Thomas More, ICE, Minneapolis, Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, & Senator Collins’s little carve-out for Maine from the ICE terror-harassment campaign to try to boost her reelection chances…
When Ian McKellen brings a 1517 anti‑immigrant riot onto Colbert’s stage, it throws Trump, Miller, ICE, Minneapolis, and Susan Collins’s Maine exception into a very harsh light. A four‑hundred‑year‑old speech about “wretched strangers” explains more about America’s ICE raids and senatorial clientelism than a shelf of think‑tank reports. Shakespeare’s version of Thomas More demands we imagine ourselves as the immigrant; Trump’s Washington and Collins’s Maine prefer a bespoke exemption from the terror-harassment.
Ian McKellen & Stephen Colbert. 2026. “There Is Nothing I Enjoy More Than Acting In The Theater”. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. February 4. <https://youtu.be/2l2RqzVG4ag?si=Kaf0sXCC8qEsjjs-&t=1339>
On Colbert’s Late Show, Ian McKellen ended his very delightful interview by performing the Thomas More speech calming the London anti-immigrant riots of 1517, according to William Shakespeare and his coauthor-playwrights, together authors of the “Sir Thomas More” play never staged in Shakespeare’s lifetime. It is, ala, entirely current:
Grant them [the immigrants] removed.
And grant that this your noise hath chid down all the majesty of England. Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, their babies at their backs with their poor luggage, plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation; and that you sit as kings in your desires, authority quite silenced by your brawl, and you in ruff of your opinions clothed. What have you got?
I’ll tell you: you have taught how insolence and strong hand should prevail, how order should be quelled. And by this pattern not one of you should live an aged man; for other ruffians, as their fancies wrought, with self‑same hand, self reason and self‑right, would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes feed on one another.
You’ll put down strangers, kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses. Oh, desperate as you are, wash your foul minds with tears; and those same hands that you, like rebels, lift against the peace, lift up for peace, and your unreverent knees, make them your feet to kneel, to be forgiven.
And say now the king, as he is clement if the offender mourn, should so much come too short of your great trespass as but to banish you. Whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error, should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders, to any German province, Spain or Portugal—anywhere that not adheres to England—why, you must needs be strangers.
Would you be pleased to find a nation of such barbarous temper, that, breaking out in hideous violence, would not afford you an abode on earth; set their detested knives against your throats, spurn you like dogs, and, like as if that God owned not nor made not you, nor that the elements were all appropriate to your comforts, but chartered unto them?
What would you think, to be thus used?
This is the stranger’s case; and this your mountainish inhumanity…
Ian McKellen walked onto Stephen Colbert’s stage and did something that American “grown‑up” politics has not managed in a very long time: he made the moral stakes of immigration policy unmistakable.
He did it not with a white paper, or a pollster‑tested slogan, but by reaching back four centuries to a fragment of Shakespeare—a speech Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights had written to put into the mouth of Thomas More—and dropping it squarely into our Minneapolis‑2026, ICE‑on‑the-streets present.
The setup, as McKellen patiently explained, is simple:
London, 1517.
A mob is in the streets, rioting against “strangers” – recent immigrants.
The rioters demand they be driven out.
The authorities send out a young lawyer, Thomas More, to quiet the riot. H
He does it in two ways:
First, the prosaic one: you cannot riot like this; it is against the law.
Second, the one only a dramatist of Shakespeare’s caliber can supply: an appeal to imagination and reciprocity.: “Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,/Their babies at their backs, and their poor luggage,/Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation…”
And then the knife:
Would you be pleased to find a nation of such barbarous temper
That, breaking out in hideous violence, would not afford you an abode on earth…?
What would you think to be thus used?
This is the stranger’s case; and this your mountainish inhumanity…
It’s hard to imagine a more direct rebuke to the core emotional engine of Trump‑Miller immigration politics: the insistence that the people we turn into examples and statistics cannot, must not, be imagined as ourselves.
Now juxtapose that with the news crawl under McKellen’s performance.
While McKellen is channeling Shakespeare’s version young Thomas More, the actual United States government is conducting what Minneapolis protesters, the ACLU, and Common Cause are calling and what we are all seeing the ICE terror‑and‑harassment campaign. Masked ICE and Border Patrol agents in unmarked vans; murder; “surge” operations that look less like law enforcement and more like a test run for an internal security service. The administration’s priority is not removing dangerous people without legal immigration status. It is demonstrating, for the cameras and the base, that there exists a class of humans inside the United States who may be treated as less than fully human. Moreover, the president and his functionaries are the ones who decide who is in that class—and if you anger them, you may join them, and the Supreme Court’s corrupt majority is likely to stay any attempt by any lower court to vindicate the rights the American Constitution gives you.
Stephen Miller wrote the anti-immigrant riot-crowd’s talking points in his sleep.
There is a “moderate” wing of the Republican Party. There are people who insist that they are troubled by the tone, uncomfortable with the cruelty. But, alas, somehow they find themselves voting to fund the apparatus almost every time it comes up.
Which brings us to Senator Susan Collins of Maine. Collins has built an entire career out of wringing her hands while walking, firmly, with her caucus. On the Supreme Court, on tax cuts, on impeachments one and two. She specializes in expressing concern while enabling outcomes. And so, when the ICE surge operations finally began to bite politically – not morally, not constitutionally, but politically—how did she respond?
By asking that they please, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, stop in Maine.
The reporting is striking. As she watched Minneapolis, Collins was on the phone to the White House and DHS leadership working toward a “solution”: the administration would call off large‑scale ICE operations in her state. Not everywhere. Not as a matter of the rule of law. As a carve‑out. The official line is that this was a “win”: Collins, we are told, “stood up” to the administration and delivered for her constituents. And it is, in the crudest transactional sense, a win. Fewer Black and brown families in Maine will have to look over their shoulders in the supermarket parking lot. If you live there, you would be crazy not to be relieved.
This is, I think, the piece that McKellen’s performance throws into such unforgiving relief.
Shakespeare’s More insists on universality. The whole rhetorical trick is to force the rioters to imagine themselves as the people they wish to drive out, and then to ask: when you are the stranger, what rights do you want to claim, and what obligations will you wish others had recognized?
And Collins? As a good New England retail politician she seeks an accommodation: a local exception, a temporary dispensation. There is a word for this kind of bargaining with arbitrary power. It is not “moderation”. It is clientelism: I will do nothing to stop the despot, but I will plead for my village.
But once you accept that the category “stranger” is a legitimate political target – that there is such a thing, in a constitutional republic, as a population against whom terror is a permissible tool—the only remaining question is whether your donors and voters are inside or outside that category. And that is something that you cannot control, not even by offering the Trumpists more and more of your resourcesm and of your soul.
The administration’s own language—“domestic terrorism”, “secret funders”, “antifa” as an all‑purpose bogey—is an open invitation to turn the same machinery now used against immigrants against everyone. Once the norm is that the president can unleash masked federal agents into disfavored jurisdictions and then dial them back when a friendly senator asks nicely, we are a long way down the road from “equal protection of the laws.”
I do know this: the “stranger’s case” is being argued right now in Minneapolis streets, in ICE field offices headed by imported Border Patrol brass, and in senatorial phone calls that seek not to end the abuses but to redirect them.
The playwrights’ Thomas More has a question for Susan Collins, for every Republican who has made their peace with Trump‑Miller immigration policy, and, frankly, for every Democrat tempted to treat Minneapolis as unfortunate but distant: when the categories flip, and you find yourself the stranger, what standard will you wish that you had enforced?
Because you do not get to negotiate a permanent exemption for Maine, or for yourself. Grifter-politicians and plutocrats may think that the kleptocrats of the Trump affinity regard them as friends. They do not. They ultimately regard them—as they regard all of us—as prey.
Continuing the Thomas More theme: Susan Collins might want to watch Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. In particularly the line More directs to the notoriously spineless Richard Rich:
"Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world ... but for Wales?" Substitute Maine for Wales and you have it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPjTzEVY8No
Magnificent!
A speech from over 400 years ago more potent and wise than anything penned by our modern pundits.