Dear America

by Jose Antonio Vargas

  “Look, I didn’t mean to seem like a jerk. I’ve seen you on TV. Bragging.”

  “Bragging about what?”

  “Being illegal.”

  I told that it wasn’t something I brag about. It’s not something I’m proud of. It’s something I want to fix, and that there’s no way to fix it.

  “You want to get legal?”

  “Of course. Why would I want to be like this?”

  “Oh.”

  He lives in New Jersey, right outside of Trenton. He said he was forty-eight, and he had just gotten laid off from his job at an insurance company, where he had worked for almost a decade. He’s divorced with two kids, both teenagers. After about fifteen minutes of conversation, as we made our way into the baggage claim area, he felt the need to point out that he voted for Obama twice. I told him Obama had deported more immigrants than any other modern president, a fact that seemed to surprise him.

  “Politics,” he said, shrugging.

  “Fucking politics,” I said.

  I gave him my business card and wrote DefineAmerican.com/facts on the back of it. That site, I told him, has all the facts he would ever need to know about immigration. I wanted to ask him if he knew where his ancestors came from, if he knew what papers they had when they moved to America. But I didn’t. I told him I needed to go, and we parted ways. I’ve yet to hear from him on email.

  It’s not only people who’ve seen me on Fox News who appoint themselves as immigration officials questioning why I’m here.

  In May 2018, I was invited to speak at a symposium on early life stress. Organized and hosted by the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the gathering attracted a who’s who of experts on children’s mental health. Barbara Picower, an early booster and supporter of Define American, kicked off the daylong conference and sat in the front row. I’d never been surrounded by so many pediatricians, researchers, and scientists, all grappling with how to study and combat what everybody was calling “toxic stress.” The first speaker was Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, the founder of the Center for Youth Wellness, whose TED talk, “How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across a Lifetime,” has more than 3.7 million views. Before Geoffrey Canada, the creator of the much-lauded Harlem Children’s Zone, took the podium to close out the day, I participated in a panel. About a hundred people were in the room. Some people had either seen me on TV or heard my story. Some people had not. After my brief talk, a middle-aged woman sitting in the middle of the room raised her hand. She looked like she was South Asian.

  “I find your comments very offensive, because we are immigrants, we came legally to this country, we followed all the rules,” she said, looking me straight in the eye.

  I could feel the room’s temperature heighten.

  The woman continued.

  “You should not group together legal and illegal immigrants because we followed every rule that the U.S. told us to follow. We didn’t break any laws and we entered this country legally.”

  A young woman was seated directly in front of the older South Asian woman. She looked increasingly uncomfortable, eventually appearing to melt into her seat. I thought I heard some people gasp. Others looked at me in horror.

  The older woman went on, her voice rising.

  “You’ve broken the laws of this country! Don’t bind legal with illegal. We are different. We are not you.”

  At that point, I jumped in. Don’t lose your cool, I started telling myself. Don’t yell. Don’t get mad. Don’t lose your cool.

  “I hear this a lot, and it’s really important that we address it. Out of thirty-four people in my Filipino American family, I’m the only one who’s undocumented. So you cannot separate the ‘legal’ from the ‘illegal,’ ” I said. “And, by the way, I am here illegally, but as a human being, I cannot be illegal because that doesn’t exist. People cannot be illegal.”

  She cut me off.

  “You had a chance to become legal because of amnesty.”

  “Which was in 1986,” I interjected. “I came here in 1993.”

  One of the symposium’s organizers intervened and said the conversation was off topic. I wanted to keep going. I wanted to show everyone in the room that when it comes to immigration, the ignorance and indifference go far beyond the confines of Fox News, conservative radio, and Breitbart. They were right here at MIT.

  After the panel, the attendees started spilling out of the room. 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.

  “All the resources that are going to the illegals should be going to the blacks,” she said, referring to Canada’s speech. Canada is African American. “They’re Americans. You’re not.”

  I gave her my business card and walked away.

  21.

  Progress

  I’m neither a Republican nor a Democrat. I don’t identify as a liberal or a conservative. In my mind, progress—being progressive—should not be limited by politics, and certainly not dictated by one party. But since I’m an undocumented and gay person of color, I’m considered a progressive. And the thing about being an “activist” in progressive circles is, you’re never enough.

  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.

  I’m a relative newcomer to the immigrant rights movement, which, depending on who is telling the story, has been around for decades, replenished and recharged in the mid-2000s by young undocumented people coming of age in the era of text messaging and social media. Essentially, there are two movements separated by geography and money. There is the movement in Washington, D.C., largely led by immigration-centric groups, many of them Latinos (and some Asians) who are directly impacted by the issue. They are mostly aligned with Democrats and progressives, and in recent years, business leaders like Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch (yes, the same Murdoch who owns Fox News), and Mark Zuckerberg have joined the fray. (Mark got involved when he found out that a student he was mentoring was undocumented.) Then there’s the movement in other cities and states, which too often take a backseat to the backroom partisan deals of the headline-grabbing Washington scene. I wasn’t really aware of the generational, geographic, and financial dynamic when I outed myself as undocumented and started Define American. I valued my independence, which was threatening to some people who wondered why I was bothering to go on Fox News and why I was willing to engage Republicans.

  From the outset, I made it clear that I was neither an activist nor an organizer. I report, I write, I make documentaries. Before I publicly declared my undocumented status, I started producing a documentary to capture, in real time, the journey I was on and document the people I meet. I called the film Documented. Nevertheless, to some longtime activists and organizers, my arrival to their movement was “too late” and my story was “too complicated.” Some professional advocates didn’t know what to do with me. When Jake, a co-founder of Define American, approached the Partnership for a New American Economy, a pro-immigrant group started by a coalition of business leaders like Michael Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch (yes, the Murdoch who owns Fox News), for a possible collaboration, he was rebuffed. Jake told me: “The guy I met with said, ‘We admire Jose, but he admitted to committing fraud to get jobs, and we can’t really be seen as promoting that.’ ” So m
uch for telling the truth. I thought to myself, do the people who run this group know actual undocumented people and understand what we have to do to survive?

  Weeks after the Times published my coming-out story in 2011, I had lunch with a seasoned immigrant rights organizer in D.C. He was the first one to voice what other veteran foot soldiers had been saying, which was something along the lines of: while people were protesting on the streets in 2006—when hundreds of thousands of immigrants, documented and undocumented, flooded the country’s biggest cities, including D.C.—I was working at the Washington Post, hiding my secret, building my career. “You can’t blame people for asking, ‘Is this a career move, too?’ This instant celebrity?”

  The criticism caught me off guard. From my point of view, I sacrificed my entire professional life for my personal freedom. I knew that declaring my undocumented status would elevate my public profile—that comes with the territory—but celebrity was and never is the goal. If this were any kind of “career move,” it was, I thought, a detour—my journalistic and documentary filmmaking career could have gone in multiple directions. 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. My sister Czarina, who was attending her last year of college, was especially worried. “Kuya,” she asked me on the phone, “pwede pa rin ba akong makatapos ng kolehiyo?” (“Older brother, can I still finish college?”) Though I’d saved up some money that I could live on for a few months, it ran out sooner than I had planned for. By March 2012, nine months after my public disclosure, I had $250.84 left in my checking account and $66.74 in savings. If Jake, Alicia, and Jehmu had not lent me some money, I would not have made it. Jake transferred money to my Bank of America account so I could make rent. It took a few more months to come up with a creative and legal solution. Forming my own organization would allow me to apply my skills to help rewrite the master narrative of immigration. And because I was no longer employable, being an undocumented entrepreneur would allow me to work within the confines of the law.

  A few longtime activists viewed me with suspicion that sometimes bordered on benign but palpable rejection. I was deemed “too privileged,” “an opportunist,” “elite.” “You’re too successful to represent us,” an undocumented day laborer told me at a rally in November 2013, turning away before he could hear me say that I had no intention of representing anyone but myself. 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.

  His comment cut deeper than anything any troll online has ever said to me, haunting me for days. I struggled to understand the root of his frustration. Was he insulted that I passed? Was he assuming that I wanted to live some version of the “good immigrant”/“model minority” trope? Was he frustrated that someone who is not Mexican, an ethnic identity that’s become synonymous with immigration, was taking too much space? Am I taking too much space? How much space should I take? Do I feel guilty that I managed to pass because of the color of my skin or a Tagalog accent I suppressed? What kind of test must I pass now?

  Younger activists weren’t quite sure what to make of me. While they had spent their high school and college years fighting for the DREAM Act, organizing online and on the streets, I was working in newsrooms, lying about my immigration status and passing as a U.S. citizen so I could get well-paying jobs. An activist wrote me in an email that she was unhappy that I revealed so many details about being undocumented, including getting a driver’s license. “I thought to myself that it was very selfish of you to [write] that,” she said, “because this could potentially hurt our community and people like my father who has had to pay for getting a driver’s license for the past 10 years.”

  She continued: “When I read about you, I thought, ‘We’ve been fighting for so long. Where has this guy been?’ ” I was too busy lying and passing. Now I was trying to make up for lost time.

  The interrogation of my motives and strategies continued for years, to the point that, as a proactive measure, I started referring to myself as “the most privileged undocumented immigrant in America.” It was one way of erecting armor against the criticism. It was also a way of putting up another mask. I exchanged a life of passing as an American and a U.S. citizen so I could work for a life of constantly claiming my privilege so I could exist in the progressive activist world.

  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. The difference now, however, is the publicness of social media. It’s not enough we attack systems, we also battle each other, out in the open. Bullying is commonplace. 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.

  Since I was mentored and nurtured by both white people and black people, my instinct is to bring people together. In the same way that Mrs. Denny didn’t want to leave me behind, I don’t want to leave anyone behind, either. That may seem Messianic, perhaps a tad Pollyannaish, but that’s how I’ve been built. 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.

  A month after Trump announced he was running for president, MTV aired, as part of its Look Different campaign, an hourlong primetime special called White People. MTV collaborated with Define American on the film, which was produced by Punched Productions, overseen by the wife-and-husband duo of Amelia Kaplan D’Entrone and Craig D’Entrone. I directed the special, which, in many ways, was the visual continuation of the question I posed back in 2003 in a front page article in the San Francisco Chronicle: “What is ‘white’?”

  Well, based on the interviews we conducted, the answers range from lost, confused, to in denial.

  Led by producers Erika Clarke and Shauna Siggelkow, the crew and I filmed for three months, interviewing white Millennials across the country, including Katy, an eighteen-year-old from Arizona who was convinced that being white prevented her from receiving college scholarships, a myth that I was surprised so many white people I interviewed, regardless of political orientation, believed to be true. In fact, white students disproportionately get more scholarships than students of color. MTV conducted a nationally representative survey of Millennials. Some of the results were unexpected. I didn’t know that the typical white American lives in a town that is more than three-quarters white. I also didn’t realize that the average white person’s group of friends is more than 90 percent white. Which means that many white people’s interactions with people of color and immigrants are limited to what they consume in media: the news that inform their worldview, the TV shows and movies that comprise their system of reality.

  Most shocking to me was finding out that nearly 50 percent of white Americans say that discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against minorities. And these were the young people. What about their parents? Why do they think what they think? And in my experience, many people of color, including immigrants, can be as isolated from white people as white people are to them. White people are seen less as individuals but as oppressive, overwhelming systems, systems they are ignorant of or indifferent to, if not blindly complicit in. So, where do we all meet?

  Wh
ile 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. Then, as I interviewed subjects for the MTV special, I wondered: Now, what? What is our vision for a more inclusive, more equitable America? What does that feel like and look like? Where do white people fit in it? How do we demolish white supremacy without pushing more white people to white nationalism?

  After White People aired in July 2015, I told anyone who would listen, particularly my friends who were political reporters, that I thought Trump would win. Based on my travels and my experiences, Trump hit a nerve outside of the black-and-white binary, far beyond the bubble the East Coast politicos exist within. They all told me I was nuts. They all apologized after he won.

  Four days after Trump’s election, I flew to Atlanta to give a keynote speech at Facing Race, a three-day conference presented by Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation. It’s the yearly gathering of “racial justice” and “social justice” activists and organizers where panels, workshops, and breakout sessions have titles like “Multiracial Movements for Black Lives,” which featured Alicia Garza, one of the cofounders of the Black Lives Matter movement, and Michelle Alexander, author of the seminal book The New Jim Crow. The vibe of the crowd in the auditorium was edgy and restless, the frustration and confusion all bottled up. Then, fifteen minutes into my planned remarks, which I had rewritten to address what immigrant communities should expect in Trump’s America, I was heckled by a young man whom news reports identified as Jonathan Perez, an undocumented immigrant of black, Colombian, and indigenous background. Perez was at the back of the room, and I couldn’t fully hear him. I read from news reports afterward that he shouted that U.S. citizenship and American identification “should not be a desirable goal for undocumented people.”

  What I did hear him yell was: “What if we don’t want to be American?” Followed by: “I don’t want to be American!”