Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen

by Jose Antonio Vargas

How can Martin Scorsese’s New York City be the same as Woody Allen’s New York City, which is not the same thing as Spike Lee’s New York City and Mike Nichols’s New York City? That was my introduction to perspective.

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.

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

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.

I read these words from Baldwin like they were some sort of dare: “You have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not its idea of you.”

“You’re not going anywhere. You’re already here,” Rich said. “Put this problem on a shelf. Compartmentalize it. Keep going.”

The most memorable card was from Mary, with a quote from someone named Tommy Lasorda on its cover: “The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a person’s determination.”

Since the beginning of my journalism career, there was no escaping the fact that I was lying about myself so I could survive in a profession dependent on truth-telling.

Crazy as it sounds, since I wasn’t even supposed to be working in the first place, I figured paying into the system and not benefiting from it was some kind of penance.

“Mr. Vargas, my great-great-grandmother landed near Charleston, South Carolina, and was given this.” She opened the yellowed and crumpled paper. It was a bill of sale. I’d never seen one before. “Can you connect the paper she got to the papers that you and your people can’t seem to get?”

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?

Internecine fighting has plagued all kinds of movements since time immemorial.

In the past few years of navigating the progressive activist circle, I’ve learned that there are all kinds of borders, none higher, steeper, more consequential than the borders between human beings—even among people who are fighting for the same thing but may not even agree on how to define what that thing is.

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 genuinely can never accept these kind of people with an open heart let alone a sane mind.

In their minds, I should be leading rallies, participating in protests, maybe tying myself to the White House.

I came to the realization that I refuse to let a presidency scare me from my own country.

A 2014 article published in Politico found that the U.S. 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 U.S. Marshals.