Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen

by Jose Antonio Vargas

I stood out because of everything I did not know.

What happened to all that love and longing I felt for the family and friends I’d left? Separation not only divides families; separation buries emotion, buries it so far down you can’t touch it.

Wow. I relate to this in a way I never thought of before. Felt the same way the first few years I came to Canada and now, I barely even think about this.

Are people “Asian” and “Hispanic” because Americans started labeling people “black” and “white”?

Huh.

Wherever we are and however we self-identify, non-Filipinos have an interesting way of identifying us. Even though our jobs are as varied as our people—we’re nurses and lawyers, artists and professors—most people I meet seem to think of us as servants. Apparently, we are among the most sought-after group of domestic workers. I’ve lost count of how many times someone told me, apropos of nothing, “You guys make the best nannies and maids.”

During the Philippine-American War, white American soldiers in the Philippines referred to Filipinos as “niggers” because of their dark complexion. When Filipinos first arrived in California, in the early to mid-1900s, confused Americans placed them in the same ethnic category as Mongolians. In California, local authorities imposed antimiscegenation laws on Filipinos, and Filipinos had to drive out of state in order to marry white women. Throughout the Great Depression, white Americans claimed that Filipinos “brought down the standard of living because they worked for low wages.”

After all, if Americans could come and claim the Philippines, why can’t Filipinos move to America?

My parents separated before I learned to speak, and, if family lore is to be believed, the first words I ever spoke were “Lolo” and “Lola.” As the first apo (grandchild) of Teofilo and Leonila, I was treasured, treated as if I were their own child.

The Philippines is one of the world’s largest recipients of remittances; Lolo and Lola were among the estimated 3.5 million Filipinos in the U.S. who would send monthly remittances that the Philippine economy could not survive without, creating a culture of consumerism and a cycle of financial dependency that I was part of before I even knew who I was.

If I’d been an obedient son in Pasig, I was an even more obedient grandson in Mountain View. In my mind, it was all I could do to support Lolo and Lola as they struggled to make ends meet, paying

all their monthly bills while continuing to support my mama with a monthly allowance.

The feeling of obligation runs deep.

They conspired to send me to America to give me a better life without realizing they had created a nightmare scenario for me.

“It’s Rich.” I was more comfortable with teachers and administrators than I was with my classmates. Part of it was because I was forced to grow up fast and had adult-size ambitions that seemed bigger than getting good grades and getting into a good college. I had to take care of myself.

I was too young to realize that the dream that Mama, Lolo, and Lola had for me was dictated by their own realities, by their own sense of limitations.

I decided that I must not play “the perfect victim”—in my mind, “victim” and “illegal” were one and the same. I convinced myself that someone, somewhere, somehow created “the master narrative” of illegality: human beings identified as “illegals,” as if one’s existence can be deemed unlawful; “illegals” serving Americans, either by babysitting their kids, or trimming their lawns, or constructing their houses, or harvesting their crops—the images and visuals perpetuated by the news media, corroborated in TV shows and movies; human beings being told what they cannot do and where they cannot go.

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.

“You have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not its idea of you.”

I always thought I was taking someone else’s spot. I had internalized this anxiety from years of hearing the they’re-taking-our-jobs narrative about “illegals.”

“The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a person’s determination.”

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.

Even when it seemed like everything was going well, really well, I worried about everything.

Since I began writing, the three most dangerous words in the English language for me have been “I,” “me,” and “my.” That’s partly because I’ve so internalized the axiom that I need to “earn” my American citizenship that I’m uncertain if I’ve “earned” the right to express myself in such personal terms.

I run away from people, especially people who want to get close. I run away from myself. Because I’ve never felt at home, because I’ve never had a real home, I’ve organized my life so I’m constantly on the move and on the go, existing everywhere and nowhere. I cannot sit still. I live at airports, which is somewhat fitting, since my life was changed that one morning in an airport in a country I left to go to a country where I’ve built a life that I have not been able to leave.

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.

There comes a moment in each of our lives when we must confront the central truth in order for life to go on.

I compartmentalized people like I compartmentalized feelings.

The government has no problem taking our money; it just won’t recognize that we have the right to earn it. Using my doctored Social Security number (SSN), which is not valid for employment, I’ve paid income taxes since I started regularly working at eighteen. Many undocumented workers who don’t have SSNs use ITINs. ITIN stands for Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, a tax processing number issued by the IRS. Regardless of immigration status, all wage earners are required to pay federal taxes.

Annually, undocumented workers pay $12 billion to the Social Security Trust Fund.

WTF

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.

“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.

Between 1898 and 1935, the Philippines and Puerto Rico were considered “overseas possessions” by the U.S. government. Though it comes as a shock to some Americans, America still owns Puerto Rico.

Here in the U.S., the language we use to discuss immigration does not recognize the realities of our lives based on conditions that we did not create and cannot control. For the most part, why are white people called “expats” while people of color are called “immigrants”? Why are some people called “expats” while others are called “immigrants”? What’s the difference between a “settler” and a “refugee”?

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?

Yes, we are here because we believe in the promise of the American Dream—the search for a better life, the challenge of dreaming big. But we are also here because you were there—the cost of American imperialism and globalization, the impact of economic policies and political decisions.

The TSA agent, a twenty-something black woman in a ponytail, gave me a little nod, like she knew who I was. I felt my arms tighten. I grabbed my phone, just in case I needed to call someone right away. When it was my turn to show her my Philippine passport—now the only piece of ID I had to travel—with no visa in it, I was prepared for whatever could happen. She smiled when I handed her my passport. “You’re Jose, right?” she asked, lowering her voice so no one could hear. “My brother-in-law is undocumented. I actually bought the magazine.” She pulled out the Time magazine from her bag and asked me to sign it.

OMG. Held my breath. The sigh that I sighed.

“Get in line, and come in and tell us who you are,” Wilkerson said. “We have a right to know who’s in this country. So that’s the only thing I believe. You know, they’ve put themselves in harm by coming here.” There was no time to respond to what Wilkerson said. I wanted to keep repeating: there is no line. I wanted to scream, over and over again: THERE IS NO LINE! THERE IS NO LINE! THERE IS NO LINE!

I'm screaming this too

What was his story? Why did he think it was okay to grab me like that? Did it make him feel good? Feel better, stronger? Superior? What was going through his mind when he decided that his hand should land on my shoulder? What else did he want to say? What else did he want to do?

Holy shit.

I looked for the woman and found her. She wouldn’t give me her name. She said she emigrated from India and that she became a U.S. citizen because of her husband. She also told me that she was an immigration lawyer. I was floored. If an immigration lawyer was foggy on the history of America’s immigration policies, then who could be expected to keep it straight? She was condemning me for not following a process that didn’t exist. Breathe, I told myself. Breathe in. Breathe out. Find compassion for this woman.

My hands are getting clammy and my blood is boiling...

As immigration lawyers had warned me months before, revealing my undocumented status in such a highly visible way would render me unemployable. I had to worry about making money to support myself and my family, since Mama and my siblings in the Philippines depended on a monthly allowance that I’d been providing for years.

They'll never understand this...

I did hear him say, under his breath, “You’re not even Mexican.” The day laborer, a man in his fifties, was buying into the master narrative of who undocumented immigrants are supposed to be and what we’re supposed to do.

sincerely wtf

The task of dismantling the mass detention and deportation of immigrants is so towering that people who are supposedly on the same side try to stand taller than the next person. Internecine fighting has plagued all kinds of movements since time immemorial.

We must combat anti-blackness in all communities, especially in non-black immigrant communities. Anti-black racism among Latinos, Asians, Arabs, and Middle Easterners is the other side of the white supremacy coin. We must fight white supremacy wherever it exists, within both progressive and conservative circles.

Exactly this. People so often forget this.

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 itself on what it has become. I feel like a thing that can’t just be.

What’s the point of having a home when you’re never home?

I’ve spent my entire adult life separated from Mama because of walls and borders, never fully realizing that I’ve been putting up walls and delineating borders in all my relationships. With friends and mentors, I feel like I’ve dragged them into my mess. I was always a complicated problem with no easy solution.

It’s not sex that I’m afraid of. It’s the emotion that accompanies all but the most temporary of relationships that scares me. When someone tries to get close, I hide or run away. Or both.

We were just getting to know each other, but already I was removing myself from the situation. Even if I stayed, I knew I would have to leave, because leaving, for me, was an inevitability. I couldn’t bear the weight of that myself, much less impose it on someone else. Nothing was ever permanent, so I decided that leaving was better. Nothing is better.

Huh.

My name is Jose because of Spanish colonialism. But Jose isn’t José because of American imperialism. Even my name isn’t really mine.

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, there’s a part of me, I’m uncertain how much, who is still in that airplane, wondering why Mama put me there.