After The New Yorker published a profile I’d written headlined “Mark Zuckerberg Opens Up”—and four months after hosting my “I may get deported” birthday party for my family and friends—it was my turn to open up.
On June 22, 2011, the New York Times Magazine published “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant.” The essay’s other headline: “OUTLAW.”
The moment my forty-three-hundred-word confessional was posted online, Define American was born. Cofounded with a close group of friends (Jake Brewer, one of the early innovators in online advocacy and organizing; Jehmu Greene, the former head of nonprofit groups Rock the Vote and Women’s Media Center; and Alicia Menendez, a journalist and policy expert who knew more about the ins and outs of immigration than Jake, Jehmu, and I combined did), Define American is unlike anything else in the immigrant rights space. Our tactics, from the outset, have focused on neither policy nor politics. Taking a page from the playbook of the LGBTQ rights movement, we believe that you cannot change the politics of immigration until you change the culture in which immigrants are seen. 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. Inspired by the Gay Straight Alliance movement, which grew around the time I came out as gay in high school, we started a chapters program whose members consist of undocumented students and their U.S. citizen classmates. There are almost 60 chapters in college campuses in 26 states plus D.C.
A couple of days before my essay was scheduled to be published, I was at the Times building in Manhattan, going over the printed proofs of the essay, double-checking every fact, rereading every sentence. Since I’ve lied about so many facts about my life so I could pass as an American, the last thing I needed was any kind of correction. The essay had to be airtight, unimpeachable.
My phone rang. It was one of the immigration lawyers who had been advising me. As a courtesy, I had sent a copy of the essay to the lawyers.
“Jose, are you going to print that you’ve done things that are ‘unlawful’? In the New York Times?”
“Yes. It’s in the essay.”
“Jose, the moment you publish that, we cannot help you.”
“Jose, are you there?”
She took a big breath.
Telling the truth—admitting that I had lied on government forms to get jobs—meant that “getting legal” would be nearly impossible.
I took a big breath.
“If I can’t admit that, then why am I doing this?”
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 identity I wear with deep pride. I’m such a child of newsrooms that I constructed the essay with other reporters in mind. I imagined their curiosity rising as they read certain details. “I was paying state and federal taxes, but I was using an invalid Social Security card and writing false information on my employment forms,” I wrote in one part. In another part, I detailed how I got a driver’s license from Oregon. In writing the essay, I thought I was leaving bread crumbs for journalists to follow and investigate the “why” and “how” of it all.
There are so many “how” questions.
How do undocumented workers who have no legal papers pay income taxes?
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. Nationwide, the amount of taxes that the Internal Revenue Service collects from undocumented workers ranges from almost $2.2 million in Montana, which has an estimated undocumented population of four thousand, to more than $3.1 billion in California, which is home to more than three million undocumented immigrants. According to the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants nationwide pay an estimated 8 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes on average. To put that in perspective, the top 1 percent of taxpayers pay an average nationwide effective tax rate of just 5.4 percent.
How do undocumented workers contribute to Social Security?
I’ll never forget the day I received a letter from the Social Security Administration (SSA) outlining my “earnings record.” The letter said that I’d paid $28,838 to Social Security and that my employer also paid $28,838. I didn’t keep track of it. All I knew was, whenever I got a paycheck, they took out money for Social Security and Medicare. I never bothered wondering what that meant, given that I knew I had no access to the funds. 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.
Perhaps a whole lot of workers are doing a whole lot of penance. According to the SSA itself, unauthorized workers have paid $100 billion into the fund over the past decade. An estimated seven million people are currently working in the U.S. illegally, of whom 3.1 million are using fake or expired Social Security numbers and also paying automatic payroll taxes. Exactly how the SSA accepts and credits payment to invalid 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
.
A longtime journalist who edited immigration for a regional news outlet told me: “Even when we report facts about undocumented immigrants, the readers either don’t care or don’t want to believe it. That’s how successful the right-wing sites have been.”
The overall result?
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.
Immediately after my essay was posted online and shared on social media, I was viewed with suspicion, sometimes dismissed as an “advocate” with a “clear bias” and an obvious “agenda.” My truth—the facts of how I got here, the context in which I had to lie in order to survive—was an agenda. I was no longer just writing the stories, I was now being written about, subject to how other people perceive the story based on their knowledge of the issue. I was prepared for that. I expected it. After all, journalists, especially the good ones, are known for their bullshit detectors. What I did not fully anticipate was that my story would be largely viewed through a political lens, usually couched and anatomized in partisan and politicized terms. Here’s the “immigration reform,” “pro-immigrant” side, and here’s the “no amnesty,” “anti-immigrant” side, substituting the appearance of balance and neutrality for real insight.
To achieve journalistic “objectivity,” we sacrifice people’s humanity. It was a sobering experience, being on the other side. It made me wonder how the subjects of and sources for my news stories felt about what I wrote.
A few months after I profiled Zuckerberg, I approached David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, about my story. I got him on the phone, confessed that I was undocumented, and said that I was planning to come out. I said I wanted to publish the essay in his magazine. He wasn’t interested. I hung up.
Mustering some much-needed courage, I then reached out to Katharine Weymouth, the publisher of the Washington Post. Unlike Remnick, Weymouth was interested in the story. She connected me with Marcus Brauchli, the Post’s top editor. The last time I’d communicated with Brauchli was in the summer of 2009. I was still in the closet about my undocumented status, and he was trying to convince me to stay at the Post. Instead, I left to work for HuffPost.
Brauchli wondered if he could assign Post journalists to interview me and write my story. I declined. I insisted on writing the story myself. For three months I worked with Carlos Lozada, the editor of the Outlook section, which publishes op-eds and commentary. An immigrant from Peru, Carlos legally emigrated to the U.S. as a child. He was one of a handful of Latino editors in the entire newsroom. Carlos has a good bullshit detector. He was relentless in making sure I was telling the truth, the whole truth. While we were crafting the essay, Carlos wondered what form of identification I was using to get through airport security since my Oregon driver’s license had expired. Following the advice of my lawyers, I hadn’t told him that I managed to procure a new license from Washington State, one of the few states that allow its undocumented residents to drive. Carlos was adamant that we include that information in the essay. We did. Another editor, Ann Gerhart, also known for her keen journalistic eye, and an ace fact-checker, Julie Tate, rereported what I wrote, to make sure all the facts lined up. I was getting anxious about the essay’s publication date when Carlos called to tell me that Brauchli decided to kill the story. Carlos did not agree with the decision; he urged me to find a home for the essay that he had meticulously edited for weeks. I emailed Brauchli and got no response. I emailed one of his deputies, Liz Spayd. Still, no response. I was floored. Hurt. This was the Post, where I’d grown up, to which I owe so much of my journalistic identity. But there was no time to feel anything. I needed a Plan B. I reached out to Peter Baker, a friend and former colleague at the Post who had decamped to the Times. Peter vouched for me. When Peter shared my essay with other editors at the Times, they rushed to publish it.
The Post ran a news story explaining why they spiked the story. The headline: “Why did the Post deport Jose Antonio Vargas’s story?”
Looking back to that summer of 2011, what some of my fellow journalists failed to grasp about my specific story represented the inability of the agenda-setting news media to understand the broader issue of immigration and the millions of people who are directly affected by it. This disconnect cannot be divorced from the fact that, in a country where the Latino population, the country’s largest racial minority group, sits at more than fifty-eight million, journalists of Latin descent are grossly underrepresented in most major American newsrooms. That was the case when I was starting out in the late 1990s. It’s still very much the case today. Of course, immigration is not only a Latino issue. But because immigration is often tied to race, Latinos are disproportionately affected.
To an undocumented immigrant who happens to be a journalist, what has made the past few years even more maddening is how generally uninformed journalists are about immigration. With some notable exceptions—including the insightful work by Dara Lind at Vox and Cindy Carcamo at the Los Angeles Times, not to mention Maria Hinojosa at NPR’s Latino USA, Univision’s Jorge Ramos, and the syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrette Jr., to name just a few—the mainstream media’s coverage of immigration is lackluster at best and irresponsible at worst, promoting and sustaining stereotypes while spreading misinformation. Television is the worst culprit. Facts often take a backseat to what this or that political figure has to say about immigrants. Context is the invisible ghost that haunts many TV segments, radio hits, and news articles. Most journalists and media influencers I’ve spoken to or have been interviewed by do not know basic information about immigration and how the system works—or doesn’t.
In the early days of Define American, our team fielded regular requests from MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News to talk about immigration. Usually the “live hits,” as the segments are called, involved debating someone who is a Republican pundit or operative. Sometimes it would be with a Democrat, and the segment was billed as more of a conversation. Whatever the framing, the live hit would last somewhere between two and three minutes, if that, which means I would get no more than forty-five seconds, maybe a minute in total, if I was lucky, to make a point. Often, the issue would be about “comprehensive immigration reform,” or “border security,” or the DREAM Act, as if those were the only issues that concern undocumented immigrants in particular and Americans in general.
In February 2017, a month after President Trump took office, I agreed to go on Erin Burnett’s eponymous show on CNN. The subject was Trump’s plan to “secure the border.” Before we went on-air, Erin turned to me and asked: “So, you’re still undocumented, right?” I was flabbergasted. Did she think being undocumented is like some light that I can easily turn on or off?
Twice I’ve been a guest on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. There was a small reception for the guests and their guests after the live taping, and Maher showed up for a few minutes to mingle. At the reception after my second appearance, in April 2017, Maher told me he was confused. “I just don’t understand,” he said, “why you just can’t fix this thing,” as if “this thing” is a chipped tooth or a dent in a Tesla. If Maher, of all people, doesn’t understand how even someone high profile like me can’t just “fix this thing,” then it shouldn’t be a surprise that most people, regardless of political affiliation, have no idea how the immigration system works.
If Bill Maher doesn’t get it, we’re all in trouble.
When I found out that Chuck Todd, the host of NBC’s Meet the Press, was scheduled to do a one-on-one interview with Donald Trump as he secured the Republican presidential nomination in May 2016, I emailed Todd and asked that we speak on the phone. On the call, I tol
d 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.
Collectively, the news media is running out of time in chronicling a demographic makeover unlike anything this country has ever seen. The estimated eleven million undocumented immigrants don’t live on an island unto ourselves. At least forty-three million immigrants, documented and undocumented, reside in these United States. You cannot separate the documented from the undocumented population, because many undocumented people, myself included, have family members who are U.S. citizens or permanent legal residents. At least nine million people, in fact, are part of what are called “mixed-status” families—households in which one member or more is here legally and the others are not. We’re all mixed up.
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 passed Congress and been signed into law. Between 1965 and 2015, new immigrants and their offspring accounted for 55 percent of U.S. population growth, according to the Pew Research Center. In the next fifty years, immigrants and their offspring are expected to comprise 88 percent of our country’s total population growth. In other words, a country that’s been long characterized by its black-and-white binary now faces a far more complex and unparalleled demographic reality.
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