DENVER — A recent social media campaign created by the U.S. Department of Labor is garnering a lot of criticism not only for its similarities to post-war era government propaganda, but for a narrow depiction of American workers.
Launched in September, Project Firewall is a crackdown on abuse of the H-1B visa program. On social media, the Department of Labor has turned to a particular Norman Rockwell-like style to promote hiring American citizens over foreign workers.
Each image is of almost exclusively white males, with headlines like "Build your Homeland's Future" and "Americans First."
One post features an actual Norman Rockwell painting, Freedom of Speech, from 1943. The Department of Labor headline above the artwork is: “American Jobs should go to American Workers.”
The posts have garnered thousands of comments, with many of them calling the agency out for using artificial intelligence to generate images instead of hiring artists to create the images in the first place.
“Looks like a Soviet train station mural,” Carol Fairbank commented on one of the posts.
“All Americans, or just certain ones?” Jennifer Johnson Edwards remarked.
For perspective on the issue, Denver7 anchor Jessica Porter spoke with University of Denver Professor Ana Babić Rosario, who studies nostalgia marketing. She said these types of images can be powerful and efficient.
“It's been used for a very long time to shape cultural narratives, and it is particularly effective when there are times of uncertainty, like the ones that we're living through right now," Rosario said. "People are looking for those emotional cues to times that might have been better objectively or just in a perceived way, because that provides comfort in the present moment."
She said the images are not just about looking back, but about shaping who we want to be. It’s part of what she calls a larger movement to reinterpret classic American imagery.
“We've been seeing this over the last 15 years with memes, when people, organizations, brands, groups, all take bits and pieces of something that is visually familiar to people and give it new meaning,” Rosario said.
On the Department of Labor’s social media pages, there is only one post from this nostalgic imagery campaign that features a woman and a person of color.
Overall, the images fail to depict the actual demographics of the American workforce then and, particularly, now.
According to 2024 federal labor data, 47% of workers are women, 20% are Hispanic or Latino, 13% are Black, and 7% are Asian.
In an opinion piece in USA Today, Norman Rockwell’s family were critical of the Trump administrations unauthorized use of the artists’ work on the Department of Homeland Security’s social media page saying, “If Norman Rockwell were alive today, he would be devastated to see that his own work has been marshalled for the cause of persecution toward immigrant communities and people of color.”
In response to the backlash on social media about their social media campaign, the Department of Labor told The Washington Post, “Twisting social media posts celebrating American workers and the American Dream into a race story is absurd.”
