Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen

by Jose Antonio Vargas

Separation not only divides families; separation buries emotion, buries it so far down you can’t touch it. I don’t think I would ever love Mama again in the childlike, carefree, innocent way I loved her while writing that letter. I don’t know where that young boy went.

I didn’t. I was just mystified. But what was becoming clear—and what I started internalizing during my years at Crittenden—was that race was a tangible, torturous, black-or-white thing in a country where conversations about how you identify and whom you represent largely fall into two extremes. Nonblack, nonwhite people had to figure out which side they fell on and to which degree.

In my early formative days in America, while observing my classmates and watching TV and movies, I learned that race was as much about behavior—perceived behavior, expected behavior—as it was about physicality. “Don’t be too white,” I overheard my Mexican classmates tell each other. “Why are you acting so black?” my Filipino friends said to one another. None of the comments sounded complimentary. Sometimes the comments from my nonwhite, nonblack classmates were as negative toward “white” people as they were toward “black” people. Too often I stayed silent because I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure how a Filipino was supposed to look, or where a Filipino was supposed to fit.

Perhaps that’s because Filipino culture, while proud of its singularity and eccentricity, is so malleable. Adaptability was essential for surviving 420 years of emotional and physical ravages.

From the outset, this codependent and abusive relationship has been complicated by race and skin color.

Throughout the Great Depression, white Americans claimed that Filipinos “brought down the standard of living because they worked for low wages.” Many hotels, restaurants, and even swimming pools displayed signs that read “POSITIVELY NO FILIPINOS ALLOWED!”

Still, if the Philippines was America’s “first real temptation,” as Mark Twain wrote, then America, given its imperialist history, also became a temptation for Filipinos eager to escape poverty and provide for their families. After all, if Americans could come and claim the Philippines, why can’t Filipinos move to America? Colorism cuts deep in any colonized country, and I was born to parents who were considered the mestizos (light-skinned ones) in their own families. I am the only child of Emelie Salinas and Jose Lito Vargas.

Where I grew up, Filipinos who populated public schools struggled to figure out where we belonged in an America that sees itself as mostly black and white. If America is a wobbly three-legged stool, with white Americans and black Americans each taking a leg, the third leg is divided between Latinos and Asians, whose histories of struggle and oppression are often maligned and neglected. I’m not sure which leg Native Americans would stand on. As for the Filipinos, we are stuck in the middle of one leg of that wobbly stool.

While the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act benefited Asian immigrants, it put Latinos at a disadvantage. Before 1965, immigration from Mexico and other Latin American countries was largely unrestricted, and there was a government guest worker system called the bracero program that permitted millions of Mexican nationals to work in the U.S. The dissolution of the bracero program and the enactment of the 1965 immigration law created an “illegal immigrant” problem where there had been none.

I swallowed American culture before I learned how to chew it. Being an American felt like a role I had to play, in an extemporaneous one-man play I made up after I found out I was not supposed to be in America. Talk like an American. Write like an American. Think like an American. Pass as an American.

The 1990s was the beginning of hip-hop’s rise as the most popular genre of music, particularly among young people. I convinced myself that reciting the lyrics to every one of Lauryn Hill’s and Tupac Shakur’s songs was proof of my American-ness. When I heard about a thing called country music, and couldn’t find that much country music at the libraries, I went to Tower Records and listened to songs by Garth Brooks and Dolly Parton. For me, movies were like a field trip, a way of seeing just how vast the country is. In a span of a few weeks, I watched Goodfellas, Hannah and Her Sisters, Do the Right Thing, and Working Girl. I was floored when I realized that they were all filmed in a place called New York City.

I was drawn to Angelou because she bore a resemblance to Lola, with the same low and rich timbre of a voice. Almost daily, Rosie’s show featured someone from Broadway, including the actress and singer Audra McDonald, whose voice was so expansive—swinging and soaring, walloping and wailing—it seemed to jump out of the screen and into my bedroom. I didn’t know what Broadway was, or how the Tony Awards differed from the Oscars or the Emmys, but because of McDonald, I recorded the 1998 Tony Awards on TV, which Rosie hosted. About twenty minutes into the show, just as I was figuring out the difference between “Best Revival of a Play” and “Best New Play,” O’Donnell introduced a musical called Ragtime.

library.” Passing as an American was my way of exerting control over a life I had no control over. It was not my decision to come here, acquire fake papers, and lie my way into being in America. But I was here. At the very least, I felt that I had to control what kind of American I was going to be, what kind of cultural connections I was going to make, which led to what kind of mask I had to wear.

The moment I realized that writing for newspapers meant having a “byline”—“by Jose Antonio Vargas,” my name in print, on a piece of paper, visible and tangible—I was hooked. There are no writers in my family—not on my mother’s side, not on my father’s side. In the Philippines, we’re a family of farmers, nurses, cooks, accountants, construction workers, U.S. Navy veterans. I got into journalism because of a high school teacher.

First, it was a sign of rebellion and independence from my family, a way of rejecting Lolo’s strategy of working under-the-table jobs until I marry a woman and get my papers. Second, and more importantly, writing was a form of existing, existing through the people I interviewed and the words I wrote as I struggled with where my physical being was supposed to be. Writing was also a way of belonging, a way of contributing to society while doing a public-service-oriented job that’s the antithesis of the stereotype that “illegals” are here to take, take, take. I didn’t realize it then, but the more stories I reported on, the more people I interviewed, the more I realized that writing was the freest thing I could do, unencumbered by borders and legal documents and largely dependent on my skills and talent. Reporting, interviewing, and writing felt like the safest, surest place in my everyday reality. If I was not considered an American because I didn’t have the right papers, then practicing journalism—writing in English, interviewing Americans, making sense of the people and places around me—was my way of writing myself into America. In the beginning, writing was only a way of passing as an American. I never expected it to be an identity.

Instantly, journalism became not just a passion but the driving force in my life. Everything, and everyone, took a backseat to my work. Getting good grades at school took a backseat to my being a reporter. If it didn’t have anything to do with furthering my career in journalism, I didn’t do it. The myopia energized me, giving me the chutzpah (a word I first learned from Rosie’s show) to advocate for myself. After returning from the “minority” summer camp of mostly Latino and black high school students, I cold-called the Mountain View Voice, my local weekly community newspaper, and talked my way into an unpaid internship.

served on the school board. “There is always one moment in childhood,” Graham Greene once wrote, “when the door opens and lets the future in.”

“The problem with living outside the law,” Truman Capote once wrote, “is that you no longer have its protection.” I never felt protected by the law. I didn’t understand why the law was the way it was. To pass as an American, I always had to question the law. Not just break it, not just circumvent it, but question it. I had to interrogate how laws are created, how illegality must be seen through the prism of who is defining what is legal for whom. I had to realize that throughout American history, legality has forever been a construct of power. Lynchings, violent seizures of indigenous land, barring women from voting—all of that was legal. Until very recently, marriage between people of the same sex was not only considered immoral, it was illegal. “Separate but equal” was legal. Jim Crow was the law of the land.

No book stimulated me more than Morrison’s. The Bluest Eye was a puzzle: the way the book began, evoking the Dick-and-Jane-and-Mother-and-Father photograph from basic reading primers I knew nothing about; the way it was structured (the book was divided into four parts, each a season of the year); the way Morrison revealed the entire plot of the book on the very first page (Pecola Breedlove, the eleven-year-old at the center of the story, is impregnated by her own father, and she will live and her child will die); the way Morrison used language, including the italics that open the narrative. “There is really nothing more to say—except why,” Morrison writes. “But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.” The “how” of the story is Pecola being told that she is ugly, unattractive, unwanted. She takes it all in, so much that she wishes for blue eyes. The “why” of the story haunted me. Why was Pecola wishing for blue eyes when she had black ones? Who told her to want blue eyes? Why did she believe them? I would come back to Pecola’s story again and again, unlocking whatever meaning I could find. In the pages of The Bluest Eye, Pecola was a year younger than I was when I came to the U.S. Our lives couldn’t have been any more different, save for one central detail: we were both lied to. Hers was the lie that blue eyes were better, that she was not enough. I didn’t recognize the lies that made up my life until a year after reading about Pecola. By that time, I...

to do with what was right. White as the default, white as the center, white as the norm, is the central part of the master narrative. The centrality of whiteness—how it constructed white versus black, legal versus illegal—hurts not only people of color who aren’t white but also white people who can’t carry the burden of what they’ve constructed. The Bluest Eye, I would learn, was Morrison’s first book. Often, her books, from Sula to Song of Solomon to Beloved, were not displayed alongside books by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or writers who make up the canon of American literature taught at schools. Too often, while searching for her work, I was directed to the African American sections of bookstores. Searching for Morrison led me to discover the work of black poets like Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar, to the writings of black writers like Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and James Baldwin. I cite their race because it’s a crucial element of their power. Black writers gave me permission to question America. Black writers challenged me to find my place here and created a space for me to claim. Reading black writers opened doors to other writers of color, specifically Asian and Latino authors (Carlos Bulosan, Sandra Cisneros, Arundhati Roy, to name just a few) whose work was often even more marginalized than that of black writers. Indeed, if Morrison provoked me to ask more penetrating questions—to insist on the “how” and the “why”—Baldwin c...

But I know for sure that all these Americans—all these strangers, all across the country—have allowed people like me to pass. If just five people—a friend, a co-worker, a classmate, a neighbor, a faith leader—helped one of the estimated 11 million undocumented people in our country, then illegal immigration as we know it would touch at least 66 million people.

Personally, I had hoped that, by the dawn of my fourth decade, life, the kind of life that did not mean hiding from the government, hiding from loved ones, even hiding from myself—real life—would actually begin.

Journalism was a way of separating what I do from who I am, a way of justifying my compromised, unlawful existence to myself: My name may be at the top of this story, I may have done all the reporting and the writing, but I’m not even supposed to be here, so I’m not really here.

My relationships with people were shaped by the secrets I kept and the lies I had to tell; I feared that the more I shared of myself, the more people I would drag into my mess. The lies I told to get jobs were exacerbated by the lies I told friends and coworkers about who I was, where I came from, what I could not do, and why.

fearless? Why was I so scared? There comes a moment in each of our lives when we must confront the central truth in order for life to go on. For my life to go on, I had to get at the truth about where I came from. On that August afternoon, working on the biggest assignment of my life, I realized that I could no longer live with the easy answer. I could no longer live with my lies. Passing was no longer enough. Before I could write any more stories, I had to investigate my life. To free myself—in fact, to face myself—I had to write my story.

Storytelling is central to our strategy: collecting stories of immigrants from all walks of life, creating original content (documentaries, databases, graphics, etc.), and leveraging stories we’ve collected and stories we’ve told to influence how news and entertainment media portray immigrants, both documented and undocumented. If you’re a reporter looking for an undocumented mother who’s taken sanctuary in a church, you can come to us. If you’re a producer of a TV medical drama looking for stories of undocumented doctors to integrate in your show, you can contact us. Our #FactsMatter campaign combats every myth and answers every question you have about immigration. We have a #WordsMatter campaign that combats anti-immigrant speech and rhetoric that are rampant in all forms of media.

Publishing the essay, I realized, was breaking a cardinal rule in journalism: write the story, don’t be the story. And, for more than a decade, I had already broken another cardinal rule of journalism—lying. For the record, I never lied in any of my stories. I never fabricated a single fact or contextual detail or made up a source, lies that ended the careers of other journalists I’d heard and read about, from Janet Cooke to Stephen Glass to Jayson Blair. Still, I lied about who I am, specifically my legal status, a defining element of my life. To get jobs, I had lied to employers, from the Chronicle to the HuffPost, about my citizenship status. The essay was meant to right that wrong, to trace the origins of those lies, an attempt at getting at the “how” and “why.” Why did I have to lie? How does someone become “illegal”? To me, writing the essay was a personal reckoning: tell the truth, don’t pull any punches, legal ramifications be damned. Writing the essay was also a journalistic endeavor. Against the advice of lawyers—all of whom counseled me to not reveal this or that detail—I wrote it because I believed that its journalistic service to the public good was worth more than my personal need for legal protection. Yes, my life in this country was based on lies. Yes, I needed to pass as an American and as a U.S. citizen so I could work. But my journalism has always been grounded in truth since I covered that fire on the street I grew up on, and being a journalist is an id...

accounts, I have idea. Money always finds a way. Annually, undocumented workers pay $12 billion to the Social Security Trust Fund. The reality behind these numbers—the stories they tell about how undocumented people fit in the fabric of our society—is not reflected in the way the news media frames illegal immigration. Our country’s mainstream news organizations often fail to report basic facts about how much undocumented workers pay into a government that vilifies us. Whether because of ignorance or indifference, or both, failure to report these facts and provide context has perpetuated the myth of the “illegal” who is taxing social services and taking away from “real Americans.” Worse, the general ignorance and indifference by credible news outlets are dwarfed by conservative media that have prioritized immigration coverage and drive their fanatical followers to their content.

Immigrants are seen as mere labor, our physical bodies judged by perceptions of what we contribute, or what we take. Our existence is as broadly criminalized as it is commodified. I don’t how many times I’ve explained to a fellow journalist that even though it is an illegal act to enter the country without documents, it is not illegal for a person to be in the country without documents. That is a clear and crucial distinction. I am not a criminal. This is not a crime.

Race, class, and immigration are intertwined, utterly inseparable. Unlike the largely European immigrants of previous generations, most of today’s immigrants hail from Asia and Latin America, the direct result of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Arguably the least-known yet most significant piece of legislation that changed the racial makeup of the country, the law was signed a year after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and less than three months after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The timeline is significant; without the racial consciousness ushered in by black Americans and their white allies during the civil rights movement, the landmark immigration legislation would not have

Wherever I go, I carry a copy of President John F. Kennedy’s A Nation of Immigrants, a curious book that Kennedy started writing during the 1950s, a curious time in American history. This was the postwar era of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, when black Americans were denied their civil rights and immigration to the country was restricted by what Kennedy described as “discriminatory national-racial quotas.” This is the period that Trump, while campaigning for president under the slogan “Make America Great Again,” yearned for. “That’s when we had a country. That’s when we had borders. Without borders you don’t have a country,” Trump said of the 1950s, just a few decades after his grandfather emigrated from Germany.

Let that sink in: forty-two million immigrants in 187 years, then forty-three million immigrants in fifty years. That’s a lot of change in a perpetually changing America forever resistant to change. It’s no wonder that we are where we are. And for the most part, we are nowhere. News organizations, by and large, lack the clarity to look at race, immigration, and identity as intersecting issues that affect all Americans from all racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds. Too often, many of my fellow journalists—particularly white journalists, since most newsrooms are led and populated by white people—choose not to call racism what it is, allowing a white supremacist ideology to hide behind phrases like “chain migration,” “anchor babies,” and “rule of law.” All the while, our country’s framer-in-chief is President Donald Trump, who considers members of the news media who call out his half-truths and bald-faced lies as “the enemy of the people.” If Trump could spark his political career by questioning the citizenship of a sitting American president, who happened to be the country’s first African American commander-in-chief, then of course he would question anyone’s citizenship. When it comes to immigration and the question of who is welcome here, Trump is the culmination of a festering bipartisan mess and a numbingly complicit public. When will we connect the dots? When will we fully face what’s in front of us? Who gets to exercise their rights as U.S. citizens, and why?

A country has a right to define and defend its borders—I understand that reality. But our history, past and present, proves that America has been defining and defending its borders while expanding its reach on its own terms. I also understand that a country has a right to know who resides within its borders and where people come from. That was among the reasons why I outed myself as undocumented. All of that aside, this country of countries, founded on the freedom of movement, must look itself in the mirror, clearly and carefully, before determining the price and cost of who gets to be an American in a globalized and interconnected twenty-first century. This is a twenty-first-century reality that the American government, along with multinational American corporations, has largely sculpted and created, from the wars we start to the iPhones we sell to the television shows and movies we make. This is a twenty-first-century reality in which tweets and Facebook messages travel much faster and more easily than human beings. Migration is the most natural thing people do, the root of how civilizations, nation-states, and countries were established. The difference, however, is that when white people move, then and now, it’s seen as courageous and necessary, celebrated in history books. Yet when people of color move, legally or illegally, the migration itself is subjected to question of legality. Is it a crime? Will they assimilate? When will they stop? There are an estimated 258 mi...

Publicly, in front of almost two thousand people, I said that I define American by the people who have been excluded from the promise of America, which includes African Americans and Native Americans. I recited a quote from James Baldwin, words that I committed to memory the moment I read them while scouring through books at the Mountain View Public Library: “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

Privately, I was spent. I get what he was saying. American citizenship is not the be-all and end-all for everyone. American citizenship is not as simple as being born in America or pledging allegiance to the American flag during a naturalization ceremony. American citizenship is not a guarantee. Talk to indigenous people and black people; even though they may be U.S. citizens by birth, many are treated like second-class citizens. Talk to undocumented people whose idea of citizenship is providing for their families and feeding their kids. Talk to legal permanent residents—green card holders—who decided not to take the next step of applying for U.S. citizenship. Some can’t afford the fee, which is about $725. Others feel that America is not home to them, and they’re not made to feel like America is home. America is simply where they live, where they work, where they make money. And for some, home is the culture of their home country, not the culture of an adopted land that asks them to assimilate, whatever that may mean. I wish I could say that being a global citizen is enough, but I haven’t been able to see the world, and I’m still trying to figure out what citizenship, from any country, means to me. I wish I could say that being a human being is enough, but there are times I don’t feel like a human being. I feel like a thing. A thing to be explained and understood, tolerated and accepted. A thing that spends too much time educating people so it doesn’t have to educate itse...

I am not hiding from my government. My government is hiding from me. At least that’s how it’s felt in the past seven years, living a public life as undocumented while practicing what I call “radical transparency,” which has taken on various forms.

“Too often, we’re treated as abstractions, faceless and nameless, subjects of debate rather than individuals with families, hopes, fears, and dreams,” I went on, continuing to tell my story. The lies I had to tell so I could pass as an American. The sacrifices of my family: Lolo, Lola, and Mama, especially Mama. The generosity of Pat, Rich, and Jim, underscoring the all-too-forgotten reality that “there are countless other Jim Strands, Pat Hylands, and Rich Fischers of all backgrounds who stand alongside their undocumented neighbors,” who don’t need “pieces of paper—a passport or a green card—to treat us as human beings.” I wasn’t the only one who was done hiding. They were done hiding, too.

After all the years of lying, after all the years of trying to pass as an American, after all the anxiety, the uncertainty, the confusion, the only response I could get from the United States government, courtesy of the ICE agent who put me hold, was: “No comment.”

country. I refuse to live a life of fear defined by a government that doesn’t even know why it fears what it fears. Because I am not a citizen by law or by birth, I’ve had to create and hold on to a different kind of citizenship. Not exactly what President Shepard described as “advanced citizenship”—I don’t know what that meant—but something more akin to what I call citizenship of participation. Citizenship is showing up.

Citizenship is using your voice while making sure you hear other people around you. Citizenship is how you live your life. Citizenship is resilience.

But it’s more than a sobriquet, more than a term of endearment. It’s the name of my past: what Mama and everyone in the Philippines who knows me calls me. It’s the name I don’t tell people about, certainly not after I found out I was in America without proper documents. It’s the name I’ve avoided so I could construct a different kind of identity, not the “illegal immigrant” you see and hear about in the news, but a successful journalist who breaks news and writes about the news. It’s the name I’ve escaped from so I could escape whatever and whomever I needed to escape: my past and Mama, the U.S. government, myself. But there was no place to hide now, nothing to run away from, no role to play.

don’t know much about, and the country I am in, which is my home, except it isn’t. It’s dangerous out there, and home should be the place where we feel safe and at peace. Home is not something I should have to earn. Humanity is not some box I should have to check.

It occurred to me that I’d been in an intimate, long-term relationship all along. I was in a toxic, abusive, codependent relationship with America, and there was no getting out. The very reason that I’m locked up in this cell is because of who I am and who I’ve become. Who am I without America? What would I be without America?

You know how politicians and the news media that cover them like to say that we have a “broken immigration system”? Inside that cell I came to the conclusion that we do not have a broken immigration system. We don’t. What we’re doing—waving a “Keep Out!” flag at the Mexican border while holding up a Help Wanted sign a hundred yards in—is deliberate. Spending billions building fences and walls, locking people up like livestock, deporting people to keep the people we don’t want out, tearing families apart, breaking spirits—all of that serves a purpose. People are forced to lie, people spend years if not decades passing in some kind of purgatory. And step by step, this immigration system is set up to do exactly what it does. Dear America, is this what you really want? Do you even know what is happening in your name? I don’t know what else you want from us. I don’t know what else you need us to do.

Films are a way of seeing beyond yourself, into other people and other places. Films are possibilities, both real and imagined.

We think we can bury what we’ve lost under all the things we can buy. When the truth is, the loss that my mother can’t express to her mother is what I struggle to express to her now. The truth is, if Mama had known then what she knows now—that calling her on the phone is difficult, because I can’t really pretend that I know the voice on the other end of the line—that seeing her on Skype or FaceTime feels like some sort of twisted joke, exposing the reality that the technology that easily connects us has rendered the very borders that divide us even more visible—I’m not sure if she would have said good-bye at the airport.