Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen

by Jose Antonio Vargas

In 2024, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States of America. Again. In many ways, Trump’s extended reign represents two systems of reality working in parallel: (1) A country with a decades-long, broken immigration system that descendants of immigrants—everyone except Native Americans and Black Americans who are descendants of enslaved peoples—have yet to fully confront, and (2) An anti-immigrant media ecosystem that is increasingly shaping (via mis- and disinformation) and controlling our country’s immigration narrative, and whose tentacles are everywhere, from talk radio and cable news to YouTube and Spotify.

Separation not only divides families; separation buries emotion, buries it so far down you can’t touch it.

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.

It’s difficult to overstate the role the Fox News Channel has played in framing, disseminating, and cementing the anti-immigrant narrative that was central in electing Trump.

As difficult as it’s been to be exposed to the blatant ignorance and naked hatred of people from the right, it’s been equally emotionally taxing to be subjected to the unrealistic expectations and demands of the left. Identifying people as “right” or “left” is a risky overgeneralization, of course. But as someone who gets attacked by both sides, for various reasons, I’ll take the risk.

While barnstorming the country for Define American, I came to the realization that everyone feels excluded from America, even the very people whose ancestors created systems of exclusion and oppression.

How do we demolish white supremacy without pushing more white people to white nationalism?

love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

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.

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.

How the largest groups of people who migrate to the USA—voluntarily, forcibly, unknowingly, like them—do so because of what the US government has done to their countries. How a trade agreement, like the North American Free Trade Agreement, drove millions of Mexicans out of jobs and led parents to cross borders and climb up walls so they could feed their kids. How six decades of interventionist policies by both Republicans and Democrats brought economic and political instability and sowed violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. If I spoke Spanish, I could have explained, in the clearest, most accessible way I could, the connection between the dirty, muddy, worn-out Reeboks and Nikes they were wearing inside that cell and the inherent American need to expand its economic and political empire. I could have drawn a line between what used to be called “imperialism”—justified by “Manifest Destiny,” “the White Man’s Burden,” and America’s desire to “discover” new “frontiers”—to what is now known as “internationalism”

Clinton deepened the damage, signing two omnibus bills that laid the groundwork for an enforcement apparatus that has only grown under every subsequent president, Republican or Democrat.

Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996. Together, these two bills made it easier to criminalize and deport all immigrants, documented and undocumented, and made it harder for undocumented immigrants like me to adjust our status and “get legal.”

Before 1996, immigrants who had been living in the US for at least seven years, were of “good moral character,” and were “conviction-free” could get legal status if they showed that deportation would cause them or their lawfully present relatives “extreme hardship.” Since 1996, a process called “expedited removal” empowers immigration agents to deport immigrants without bringing them before an immigration judge for a hearing if said immigrants cannot prove that they have been in the country for two years.

Taken together, these bills not only expanded the criteria for who can get detained and deported, they also expanded the population of immigrants who couldn’t adjust their status, leading them to fear detention and deportation at any point. It’s a government-created, taxpayer-funded catch-22, and we’re all tied up in it like a Gordian knot.

Locking up people for the “crime” of improper migration is overcrowding federal prisons, worsening our mass incarceration problem.

2014 article published in Politico found that the US government spends more money each year on border and immigration enforcement than the combined budgets of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service, and the US Marshals. Altogether, the article noted that more than $100 billion of our tax dollars has been spent on border and immigration control since 9/11. And these numbers preceded the Trump era, with President Obama spending record sums on immigration enforcement even as he championed a broader legislative solution that neither political party had been able to deliver.

The Border Patrol, which is part of CBP, uses a “digital wall” comprising eight thousand cameras to monitor our southern border and ports of entries, and employs 18,500 agents on the nearly two-thousand-mile-long US-Mexico border. Extending from California to Texas, about seven hundred miles of fencing that includes wire mesh, chain link, post and rail, sheet piling, and concrete barriers has been constructed at a cost of between $2.8 million and $3.9 million per mile.

“Border security” means running random checkpoints anywhere within one hundred miles of the US-Mexico border, a Constitution-free zone in which agents can stop your car, inspect your belongings, and ask for your papers, regardless of your immigration status. (The Fourth Amendment does not allow for citizens to be subjected to random search and seizures, but in the interest of “national security,” the Fourth Amendment does not apply within a hundred miles of the border.)

Is this really about who has the right papers and what the laws are? Or is this about someone to control? Is this really about who is a citizen or not? Are we talking about the same citizenship that many Americans callously take for granted? Are these agents so blithely unaware that they and their government have hurt me more than I could ever hurt myself?

Home is not something I should have to earn. Humanity is not some box I should have to check.

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.

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

When it comes to immigration, media—in whichever forms you consume it—is not a slice of the pie; it’s the whole pan. Your media diet dictates what you think and feel about immigration.

Moreover, the rise of mis-and disinformation is reshaping our national rhetoric and culture. The monolithic thinking around immigration, and fanning of anti-immigration sentiment, finds a welcome home in modern media.

According to a recent study by Media Matters, right-leaning shows accounted for roughly 82 percent of the total following of 320 online shows assessed across platforms—YouTube, Rumble, Twitch, Kick, Spotify, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok.

Of American adults, 83 percent watch YouTube, and 32 percent regularly get their news from YouTube. Given how powerful YouTube is in shifting opinions and actions, and that the most successful anti-immigration videos on YouTube have collectively garnered more than 100 million views, we wanted to know which anti-immigration messages were most pervasive on the platform.

Their underlying arguments all support the white nationalist theory of the “Great Replacement,” or the idea that immigrants of color will overtake predominantly white nations, causing a “white genocide.”

immigration advocates as overly emotional and illogical, while those opposing immigration are painted as reasonable and logical, brave enough to speak the “truth” about the threat of immigrants to Western values and civilization.

63 percent of people Define American polled discussed immigration with friends and family after watching content about it on YouTube—a high translation to real-world action for media. It is critical that immigrants and allies build our own media system if we want to reach people being radicalized or pulled down a false rabbit hole.

Houston, Texas, where 25 percent of the population is foreign-born, one out of ten residents is undocumented, and the governor is hostile toward immigrants.

Dear America, you too have the power to similarly lift up immigrants and immigration in your communities and inform your friends and neighbors of the facts and humanity of the situation. Let’s frame how good immigration is for our country, and let’s do it locally. You are our media.

Trump’s America may not currently be the America I want to live in, but the United States is more than Trump, and it’s still where I want to live.

At long last, in mid-December, my O visa was approved. It’s not a green card. It does not make me a permanent resident. It does not directly put me on a path to US citizenship. It is temporary, only valid for three years—but it can be renewed.

Dear reader, I ask you to be a better media. Be a voice for immigrants in the United States of America. Use your platform and power, regardless of legal status, to help change the narrative on immigrants and fix our immigration system.