Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen

by Jose Antonio Vargas

On the call, I told him that Asians, not Latinos, are the fastest-growing undocumented population in the country and urged him to ask Trump how building a wall on the southern border would protect Americans from undocumented Asians who flew here and overstayed their visas. I added that, with nearly three-quarters of all Asian adults born abroad, Asians have passed Latinos as the largest group of new immigrants to the U.S. “That’s a good point,” he said before we hung up. Then I e-mailed him an article from The Atlantic. “Asians Now Outpace Mexicans in Terms of Undocumented Growth—Chinese, South Koreans, and Indians Among the Fastest-Growing Segments of Undocumented Immigrants,” the headline read. Todd never did ask my question, perhaps because it did not fit the narrative. Maybe he just ran out of time.