In high school, I visited New York City during the time when the original cast of Hamilton was performing on Broadway. Now, I unfortunately did not have the funds or luck to obtain Hamilton tickets (it’s pretty hard for a 17-year-old to afford Hamilton tickets in NYC), but I had listened to the soundtrack on repeat and knew that the musical Lin-Manuel Miranda created was something to go down in the history books.

I will admit, I knew little to nothing about Alexander Hamilton before Miranda’s smash-hit musical. One of the most surprising facts about Hamilton that I learned was that he, among many other things, was an immigrant, born and raised on a tiny island in the Caribbean. A Revolutionary War veteran , a Founding Father, and our country’s first Treasury Secretary…and he wasn’t even born in the country that he fought for its independence.

There are a lot of things to take from Hamilton’s story, but the one that I found most important was the idea that the origin of one’s birthplace should not be the thing that deters people from having the best chances to, as Hamilton’s character calls it, “rise up” beyond their station in life.

That idea, and this musical in general, was the basis for my remix project in my Writing for Digital Media class. Our assignment was to make a compilation of audio, video, photos, or texts that were not ours; in a sense, we were to “plagiarize” the works of others to create a new one of our own (we needed to give credit to everything we “stole,” and what we’re using our “stolen” works for constitutes a fair-use of any copyrighted material).

So for my project, I started thinking about the things that I loved, and one of the first things that popped into my mind was the musical I listen to at least once a week, if not more – Hamilton! And if there’s one thing that comes close to my love for Hamilton, it’s The Hamilton Remix soundtrack, especially the song, “Immigrants: We Get The Job Done.” That song completely encapsulates the reality of our current societal battles about immigration in the United States while also including the one of the most creative lines found in “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)” from the original Hamilton musical soundtrack. A remix song being used for my remix project? Seemed like a match made in heaven to me.

Then I started to think, “Well, Hamilton is an extremely famous immigrant who came to America and made an impact…I wonder how many others are like him too?”

And the results were astonishing. Albert Einstein, Joseph Pulitzer, Levi Strauss: all of these people (and trust me, thousands more) weren’t born in America–but they came to America to make a new life for themselves and to make a difference that they might not have had back home. I then took to researching more and more of some of the most famous immigrants to make the case that if we had turned them away when they came over, what would our country, our society, or even our world look like?

So, after I came up with a list of immigrants I wanted to display in my remix video, I searched their pictures, noted the credits, and took to Wikipedia for the origins of their birth. After gathering this information, I downloaded iMovie to mash together everything that I had. I think that a video for this project was the best medium I could have used, especially because I wanted to have “Immigrants: We Get The Job Done” playing in the background.

Navigating iMovie took a few tries to fully understand how to put all of my pieces together, but after using it for so long, it became extremely easy to finesse the many moving parts. The last thing that I wanted to add to my remix included a video of a 21st century-take on the importance of immigrants – and this came from President Barack Obama, who, in his 2014 prime time immigration speech, truly encapsulated the overall argument I wanted my video to share.

This project really made me realize that while many Americans want immigrants to come to America legally, the idea of completely shutting off immigrants from entering would severely hurt our country–a country that, all too often, forgets that it was once founded by immigrants – by people who, like the rest of us, had a dream.

To view my remix video, “We Get The Job Done,” check out the video below: