Dear America

by Jose Antonio Vargas

  Wherever I go, I carry a copy of President John F. Kennedy’s A Nation of Immigrants, a curious book that Kennedy started writing during the 1950s, a curious time in American history. This was the postwar era of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, when black Americans were denied their civil rights and immigration to the country was restricted by what Kennedy described as “discriminatory national-racial quotas.” This is the period that Trump, while campaigning for president under the slogan “Make America Great Again,” yearned for. “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.

  In the book, Kennedy, the grandson of Irish immigrants, argues for welcoming more immigrants to America as he outlines our country’s immigration history. “All told,” Kennedy writes, “more than 42 million immigrants have come to our shores since the beginning of our history as a nation.” The first time I read the book, I was blown away by that number. After doing some research, I learned that because of a 1965 immigration law that Kennedy and his brothers, Robert and Ted, championed, more than forty-three million immigrants have moved to America since, including my grandparents and many aunts, uncles, and cousins. Let that sink in: forty-two million immigrants in 187 years, then forty-three million immigrants in fifty years. That’s a lot of change in a perpetually changing America forever resistant to change. It’s no wonder that we are where we are.

  And for the most part, we are nowhere.

  News organizations, by and large, lack the clarity to look at race, immigration, and identity as intersecting issues that affect all Americans from all racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds. Too often, many of my fellow journalists—particularly white journalists, since most newsrooms are led and populated by white people—choose not to call racism what it is, allowing a white supremacist ideology to hide behind phrases like “chain migration,” “anchor babies,” and “rule of law.” All the while, our country’s framer-in-chief is President Donald Trump, who considers members of the news media who call out his half-truths and bald-faced lies as “the enemy of the people.” If Trump could spark his political career by questioning the citizenship of a sitting American president, who happened to be the country’s first African American commander-in-chief, then of course he would question anyone’s citizenship. 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.

  When will we connect the dots?

  When will we fully face what’s in front of us?

  Who gets to exercise their rights as U.S. citizens, and why?

  While I was filming a documentary at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, a student at Crazy Horse School approached me. “I know who you are,” the sixteen-year-old said. “You can’t talk about immigration and not talk about us.” At Pine Ridge, 75 percent of children live below the poverty line. The dropout rate is over 70 percent. Unemployment is between 85 and 90 percent. I’m embarrassed to say that I’d never visited a reservation before; the despair and hopelessness was staggering to witness.

  After I spoke in Wilmington, North Carolina, an elderly black woman grabbed me. “I’m not an immigrant, Mr. Vargas,” she said. “Our people were brought here against our will.” Then she pulled a piece of paper out of her purse and, in a thick southern drawl, continued, “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?”

  According to a study by Harvard University, Hurricane Maria, the worst catastrophe in Puerto Rico’s history, claimed 4,645 people—killing more people than 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina combined. A few weeks after the tragedy hit, a young man from San Juan emailed me. “Hey Jose,” he wrote, “I know you’re not a U.S. citizen but are you sure you want to be one? I’m a citizen and it don’t guarantee everything, man.”

  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.

  18.

  Who Am I?

  “Who is Jose Antonio Vargas?” read the headline of a column by Jack Shafer.

  Then a media critic for Slate, Shafer proceeded to compare me to Janet Cooke, a Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer in 1981 for an article about an eight-year-old heroin addict whom she had made up. “I know the two lies aren’t exactly analogous. Cooke told her lies to inflate her status, Vargas to normalize his,” Shafer wrote. “The trouble with habitual liars, and Vargas confesses to having told lie after lie to protect himself from deportation, is that they tend to get too good at it. Lying becomes reflex. And a confessed liar is not somebody you want working on your newspaper. . . .

  “There’s something about this guy,” Shafer concluded, “to make a journalist’s nose itch.”

  I understand Shafer’s itchy nose. I cannot stand on a moral high ground, because I lied—repeatedly and knowingly. But his words made me wonder what a journalist is obliged to reveal about his or her life. What privacy do we have a right to regarding our own stories? Had Shafer ever held anything back from his readers, particularly about his personal life? What would have happened if he discovered as a sixteen-year-old that he was an unlawful person in a country that he believed had adopted him as its own? Would he have gone to the nearest airport and flown back to where he had been sent from? What sort of life-altering decisions was he confronted with as a teenager? How did he address them? Journalism is a fishbowl, especially in Washington, D.C. Usually, reporters and editors have less than three degrees of separation. I wanted to email Shafer; he and I had corresponded in the past, after I complimented him on a particular column. I admire his work, and I wanted to talk to him on the phone and explain why I did what I did. But I stopped myself, realizing that I had bigger things to worry about than Jack Shafer’s nose.

  Journalism mentors of mine, especially those who were journalists of color, urged me to “toughen up.” Advocacy and journalism are seen as mutually exclusive, especially if you’re a journalist who happens to be a woman, queer, or a person of color, and your mere identity, your very presence, visible or invisible, can be interpreted as political in newsrooms usually run by and populated with straight white men, the framers and enablers of the master narrative. When I first started working in newsrooms in the late 1990s and early and mid-2000s, I was advised not to be so open about being gay. After writing a series of stories about AIDS in Washington, an older editor I admired stopped by my desk one afternoon. “Do you really want to be the gay reporter who writes about AIDS?” said the editor, a white, straight male. “That’s not a way to get ahead here at the Post.” Many journalists, including my own friends, balk at being labeled “advocacy journalists,” as if the designation denigrates their work. “Journalists are gonna call you different names—‘advocacy journalist,’ ‘activist journalist,’ whatever. What they call you usually reflects how they see themselves,” said Marcia Davis, who edited me for years at the Post. She’s black. “The only thing you can control,” Marcia reminded me, “is your work.”

  But what is my “work”?

  Because I had spent thirteen years of my life working in newsrooms, because a journalist was all I’d ever been, I felt disoriented and completely out of my element. I used to have one role: report the hell out of a story, and write it to the best of my ability. Now I had several roles, most of them projected onto me: “the face of undocumented immigrants,” as if an issue as complex and as charged as illegal immigration can be represented by one face and one story; “a spokesperson for immigrant rights,” as if I’m a walking compilation of talking points; and, most perplexing, “an immigrant rights leader.” I would never call myself
a “leader” and usually run away from people who refer to themselves as such. Suddenly, I was not a human being. By creating Define American with my friends, I claimed an issue and was treated like one.

  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”? Language itself is a barrier to information, a fortress against understanding the inalienable instinct of human beings to move. The United States, after all, was founded on this very freedom. A careful reading of the Declaration of Independence makes plain that among the grievances prompting the rebellion against Great Britain was the kingdom’s mishandling of migration. Of the declaration’s twenty-seven grievances against the monarch, the seventh stated: “He,” meaning King George III, “has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither.”

  A country has a right to define and defend its borders—I understand that reality. But our history, past and present, proves that America has been defining and defending its borders while expanding its reach on its own terms. I also understand that a country has a right to know who resides within its borders and where people come from. That was among the reasons why I outed myself as undocumented. All of that aside, this country of countries, founded on the freedom of movement, must look itself in the mirror, clearly and carefully, before determining the price and cost of who gets to be an American in a globalized and interconnected twenty-first century. This is a twenty-first-century reality that the American government, along with multinational American corporations, has largely sculpted and created, from the wars we start to the iPhones we sell to the television shows and movies we make. This is a twenty-first-century reality in which tweets and Facebook messages travel much faster and more easily than human beings.

  Migration is the most natural thing people do, the root of how civilizations, nation-states, and countries were established. 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? There are an estimated 258 million migrants around the world, and many of us are migrating to countries that previously colonized and imperialized us. We have a human right to move, and governments should serve that right, not limit it. The unprecedented movement of people—what some call a “global migration crisis”—is, in reality, a natural progression of history. 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. During this volatile time in the U.S. and around the world, we need a new language around migration and the meaning of citizenship. Our survival depends on the creation and understanding of this new language.

  A few months after my coming-out essay was published, I was getting antsy. I didn’t understand why I hadn’t heard a peep from the government. Moreover, as I started traveling like a walking controversy, I fielded the same questions over and over again about being undocumented, from both journalists and everyday people.

  I approached Richard Stengel, then the managing editor of Time magazine, about doing a follow-up story. I wanted to write about why I hadn’t gotten deported. He introduced me to Tom Weber, an experienced editor who came up with the reportorial structure of what ended up being a five-thousand-word cover story. In the piece, I wrote about the contradictions of our immigration debate. Polls showed substantial support for creating a path to citizenship for people like me, yet 52 percent of Americans supported allowing police to stop and question anyone they suspected of being “illegal.” Democrats are viewed as being more welcoming to immigrants, but the Obama administration had sharply ramped up deportations. The pro-business Republican Party is home to the most virulent anti-immigrant officials, even though many industries, from agriculture to construction to food processing, depend on cheap labor.

  In the piece, I answered questions such as:

  Why don’t you become legal?

  Why did you get your driver’s license when you knew it wasn’t legal?

  So you’re not Mexican?

  Why did you come out?

  For the final question, I spoke to Gaby, the young undocumented Ecuadoran whom I had met and befriended. Gaby moved to the U.S. in 1993, the same year I did. Immigration officials raided her home in 2006; her family was rounded up, and her father had to wear an ankle bracelet. She’s been fighting against their deportation since. Gaby, who has three education degrees, wants to be a special education teacher. But her life remains on hold as she watches documented friends land jobs and plan their futures.

  “For many people, coming out is a way of saying you’re not alone,” Gaby told me. “In our movement, you come out for yourself, and you come out for other people.”

  Originally, Time editors wanted to put me on the cover. As I didn’t want Define American to be the Jose Antonio Vargas show, I proposed an alternative: “What if I got thirty or so undocumented young people to agree to be on the cover?” I asked Paul Moakley, one of the photo editors.

  Paul looked surprised.

  “How are you going to find them? Are they going to be willing to be photographed? Can we use their names?”

  I asked Paul to give me a couple of days to figure it out. When I hung up with Paul, I called Gaby. Immediately, we came up with a plan. I started calling Dreamers I knew: Cesar Vargas in New York, Erika Andiola in Arizona, Julio Salgado and Mandeep Chahal in California, this kid named Victor that I had just met during my trip to Alabama. Gaby, for her part, knew way more people than I did. She was particularly excited to invite Lorella Praeli, a young undocumented Peruvian from Connecticut. I was adamant that the cover photo needed to be representative of the entire undocumented population, so we needed to find undocumented Asians, blacks, and white immigrants, too. Thankfully, Tony Choi, who was born in South Korea, Tolu Olubunmi, who was born in Nigeria, and Manuel Bartsch, who was born in Germany, all agreed to participate.

  At this point, Define American was an all-volunteer organization that had no money. I had no money. If I asked Time to cover flights and hotel rooms for undocumented people, some of whom had never flown before, I was afraid editors might get antsy and back out. So I asked Frank Sharry, a longtime advocate, a walking history book of immigration policies, if America’s Voice, his organization, could cover it. Not only did he say yes, he connected me with his colleague Pili Tobar, who offered to help out with logistics. Lucia Allain, a young undocumented Peruvian, was especially helpful in coordinating schedules. I was most worried about Victor, who was flying from Birmingham. He had never been on an airplane, never gone through an airport. To get through security, he planned to use his Mexican passport, the only government-issued ID he had. Many undocumented people use passports from their countries of origin to get on domestic flights. I had to do the same. As my lawyers had feared, the Washington State Department of Licensing canceled my license two weeks after I disclosed my undocumented status. One of my lawyers suggested I get a valid passport from the Philippine Embassy, which I did. These passports don’t have visas, which can trigger TSA agents to check their immigration status. It’s risky, especially so if your passport is from Mexico, given how often people of Mexican descent are racially profiled. We wanted to make sure Victor had all the information to make a decision for himself. We coached him on how to get through TSA: don’t look nervous, make sure your hands are not shak
ing when you show your passport, don’t smile too much. To our relief, he made it through the airport.

  Within forty-eight hours, we had assembled thirty-five Dreamers in a warehouse studio in the Meatpacking District for a photo shoot. Most of them didn’t know each other. Everyone gave their permission to appear on a cover of a major magazine—I couldn’t tell them which one—and I made sure I didn’t make any promises, in case it didn’t work out for some reason. Their trust in me, and most of them knew me by name only, was humbling.

  The photo shoot, which lasted for several hours, was among the proudest days of my entire life. The photographer, Gian Paul Lozza, and his assistants treated everyone with such dignity. There were makeup artists to make sure everyone got a touch-up before the group photo and their individual portraits. I thought of Ellen DeGeneres on the cover of Time and what that image meant to me. I could only imagine what this cover image—so many faces with names and stories—could mean for other undocumented people.

  When the group photo was selected, and when it was confirmed that indeed thirty-five undocumented people would be featured on the cover of Time, I sent an email to one of the top editors. I had a request. I told him, whatever you do, please do not call us “illegal” on the cover of Time.

  The headline of the cover story, which ended up being the cover story for all of Time’s international editions, read: “We Are Americans, Just Not Legally.”