Dear America

by Jose Antonio Vargas

  Publicly, in front of almost two thousand people, I said that I define American by the people who have been excluded from the promise of America, which includes African Americans and Native Americans. I recited a quote from James Baldwin, words that I committed to memory the moment I read them while scouring through books at the Mountain View Public Library: “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

  Privately, I was spent. I get what he was saying. American citizenship is not the be-all and end-all for everyone. American citizenship is not as simple as being born in America or pledging allegiance to the American flag during a naturalization ceremony. American citizenship is not a guarantee. Talk to indigenous people and black people; even though they may be U.S. citizens by birth, many are treated like second-class citizens. Talk to undocumented people whose idea of citizenship is providing for their families and feeding their kids. Talk to legal permanent residents—green card holders—who decided not to take the next step of applying for U.S. citizenship. Some can’t afford the fee, which is about $725. Others feel that America is not home to them, and they’re not made to feel like America is home. America is simply where they live, where they work, where they make money. 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 wish I could say that being a global citizen is enough, but I haven’t been able to see the world, and I’m still trying to figure out what citizenship, from any country, means to me. 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.

  Part III

  Hiding

  1.

  My Government, Myself

  I am not hiding from my government. My government is hiding from me.

  At least that’s how it’s felt in the past seven years, living a public life as undocumented while practicing what I call “radical transparency,” which has taken on various forms. Some people accuse me of pulling “stunts,” as if I find some kind of masochistic joy out of living in limbo. Then some people argue that I’m not radical enough, that I don’t do enough. In their minds, I should be leading rallies, participating in protests, maybe tying myself to the White House. But the only way I’ve been able to survive the discomfort and distress of the past seven years is doing what I know how to do, what Mrs. Dewar at Mountain View High School said I was good at: asking questions.

  “Are you planning on deporting me?” I asked the immigration officer on the phone.

  It was May 2012. I prepared myself for the worst after publicly declaring my undocumented status: possible arrest and detention, at any time of any day. The only thing I didn’t prepare for was silence. Especially from the government. Particularly the folks from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which had removed nearly four hundred thousand individuals from the country in fiscal year 2011, which ended September 30, 2011—exactly one hundred days after I outed myself in the New York Times. In 2010 nearly 393,000 immigrants were deported. A year before that, almost 390,000 people. John Morton, who led ICE, touted the 2011 deportation numbers, calling them the result of “smart and effective immigration enforcement” that depended on “setting clear priorities for removal and executing on those priorities.”

  “I haven’t heard from you,” I said to the officer as I introduced myself. I told her I was done hiding. I confessed how anxious I was that I’d heard nothing from ICE, nothing from the Department of Homeland Security, nothing from the Department of Justice.

  The officer, who was working at the ICE branch in New York City, where I was living at the time, was confused. She said she knew who I was.

  “Why are you calling us?” she said.

  “Because I want to know what you want to do with me.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “What are you doing?”

  The agent placed me on hold.

  A few days after the new year in 2013, I heard from the office of Senator Patrick Leahy, who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee. His office asked me to testify as part of the opening salvo in the latest push to pass immigration reform, a priority for the Obama administration. President Obama, who couldn’t have won the White House without the Latino vote in 2008 and 2012, failed in his promise to tackle the issue in his first year in office, when Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate. Since I couldn’t wrangle any answers from the immigration officer on the phone, I wanted to take my questions directly to congressional members. After all, two of the country’s most anti-immigrant senators, Jeff Sessions and Ted Cruz, sat on the committee. Janet Napolitano, who headed DHS, was also asked to testify. To my mind, nothing says I am done hiding from my government more than appearing before Congress. I wanted to make it a family affair. Jake Brewer, one of my best friends, took care of the logistics, flying everyone from California to Washington: Lola, Auntie Aida, and Uncle Conrad, joined by Pat, Rich, and Jim. Jake made sure they were all taken care of. “Itong si Jake ay sobrang mabait at marespeto,” Uncle Conrad said upon arriving at his hotel. (“This Jake guy is very, very nice and very polite.”)

  I don’t recall ever being as nervous as I was on the day of the hearing. Writing the testimony, which couldn’t be longer than five minutes, was daunting enough. I felt prepared to answer whatever questions they lobbed at me. The source of anxiety came from the terror of losing my composure and breaking down. In front of congressional members. In front of my family. In front of other undocumented immigrants, who started piling into the hearing room.

  “I come to you as one of our country’s eleven million undocumented immigrants, many of us Americans at heart, but without the right papers to show for it,” I began.

  Lola sat behind me. I was sure I could hear her heart beating. I was so overwhelmed by the row of photographers, I didn’t dare look at them.

  “Too often, we’re treated as abstractions, faceless and nameless, subjects of debate rather than individuals with families, hopes, fears, and dreams,” I went on, continuing to tell my story. The lies I had to tell so I could pass as an American. The sacrifices of my family: Lolo, Lola, and Mama, especially Mama. The generosity of Pat, Rich, and Jim, underscoring the all-too-forgotten reality that “there are countless other Jim Strands, Pat Hylands, and Rich Fischers of all backgrounds who stand alongside their undocumented neighbors,” who don’t need “pieces of paper—a passport or a green card—to treat us as human beings.” I wasn’t the only one who was done hiding. They were done hiding, too.

  As I headed for the last few sentences of my prepared remarks, I grabbed my copy of President Kennedy’s A Nation of Immigrants. The book’s foreword was written by Ted Kennedy, his younger brother who fought for the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and, in turn, fought for immigration reform arguably harder than anyone else in the Senate. My family got here because of the 1965 law. I had hidden from Kennedy, too. While I was a reporter for the Washington Post, I interviewed him in Albuquerque in February 2008, a few days after he endorsed Obama for president. I wanted to tell him I was undocumented. I wanted to ask him for help. But I chickened out. I was not chickening out today.

  I went off script.

  “Before I take your questions here, I have a few of my own: what do you want to do with me?

  “For all the undocumented immigrants who are actually sitting at this hearing, for all the people watching online, and for the eleven million of us: what do you want to do with us?

  “And to me, the most important question, as a student of American history, is this: How do you define ‘American’?”

  As I ended my remarks, the only senator to ask a question
was Sessions.

  “Mr. Vargas, would you agree fundamentally that a great nation should have an immigration policy and then create a legal system that carries that policy out and then enforces that policy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  That was it. Faced with a real person, “a criminal alien,” in his words, the kind whom he regularly describes as if he’s talking about fungus in his toenail, that was his only question. Cruz wasn’t even around; I don’t think he heard the testimony. The silence from the other Republican senators who oppose any sort of reform, which they categorically call “amnesty,” reminded me of the silence from the immigration officer I had called just a few months before.

  I would find out that even though I publicly declared my undocumented status—on the phone, on TV shows, in front of Congress—I still did not exist in the eyes of ICE. Like most undocumented immigrants, I’d never been arrested. I’d been so careful not to get arrested. And that meant I’d never been in contact with ICE.

  After all the years of lying, after all the years of trying to pass as an American, after all the anxiety, the uncertainty, the confusion, the only response I could get from the United States government, courtesy of the ICE agent who put me hold, was: “No comment.”

  How do you build a life with “no comment”?

  2.

  Home

  I was stuck in traffic, one of those afternoon, bumper-to-bumper jams that Los Angeles is legendary for. Since my car was not moving anytime soon, I grabbed my iPhone and started scrolling through emails. I almost hit the gas and crashed into the Toyota Prius in front of me when I read the subject line: “Ready to buy a home?”

  Is this a joke?

  Is some divine, spiritual power trying to test me?

  This was March 2017, at which point I had moved to Los Angeles. California had joined eleven other states (plus Washington, D.C.) in allowing their undocumented residents to apply for driver’s licenses. I was renting a massive loft downtown, the largest place I’d ever lived in. Because I travel so much, because my life is in a packed suitcase, I had always had relatively small apartments. What’s the point of having a home when you’re never home? This time, I convinced myself that if I got a big-ass place and decorated it with all kinds of furniture and knickknacks, like a bookshelf made of wood and wire shaped like the USA, if I crowded the apartment with framed photographs of family and friends (a rare picture of Mama, Papa, and me together, celebrating my second birthday; a picture of Lolo, Lola, Uncle Conrad, and me in Zambales), if I hung up posters of Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Maya Angelou, who comprise what I consider my holy trinity of spiritual guidance, then maybe, just maybe, I would feel at home.

  I opened the email, which turned out to be a promotional email from Bank of America’s Home Loan Navigator. I’ve been a Bank of America customer since 1999, when Pat helped me open my only bank account. Since my life is dependent on and limited by government-issued IDs, I feel a special kind of ironic connection to my Bank of America debit card. It’s the same reason I often use my American Express card and, whenever possible, fly on American Airlines.

  I was so incensed and offended by the spam email that a few minutes later, I pulled over on the side of the freeway and called the number listed in the email.

  I told the woman that asking me if I was ready to buy a home was cruel and unnecessary.

  I told her that even though I didn’t need a loan, that I’ve worked hard and have the means to put a down payment on a home, I couldn’t buy a home because I didn’t know anymore if this was my home.

  I told her that I didn’t know what else I had to do to prove to people that this is my home.

  I told her that I could be deported at any time.

  Her name was Paula. She cut me off.

  “Mr. Vargas, what are you talking about?”

  “I am undocumented. I don’t have the right papers to be here.”

  “What do you mean? You’re a Bank of America client. You’re a longtime client.”

  She paused and, a few seconds later, asked, “Are you an illegal?”

  There are many things this “illegal” cannot do.

  I cannot vote. Which ID will I use to vote? My American Express card? Though I’ve lived in this country for twenty-five years, though I pay all kinds of taxes, which I am happy and willing to pay, since I am a product of public schools and public libraries, I have no voice in the democratic process. Think of it as taxation without legalization.

  I cannot travel outside the United States. If I leave, there’s no guarantee that I’d be allowed back.

  I don’t have access to Obamacare or any government-funded health program. In fact, even though I started and oversee a nonprofit organization that provides benefits and health insurance to seventeen full-time staffers, I have to buy my own private health insurance.

  But as I get older, as the sense of isolation and invalidation digs deeper and deeper, I cannot bear to look myself in the face. Even though I am no longer hiding from the government, I am hiding from myself, all alone in a massive loft.

  3.

  Distant Intimacy

  “You’re really good at distant intimacy,” a close friend (at least I thought we were close) once said to me.

  I’ve spent my entire adult life separated from Mama because of walls and borders, never fully realizing that I’ve been putting up walls and delineating borders in all my relationships. With friends and mentors, I feel like I’ve dragged them into my mess. I was always a complicated problem with no easy solution.

  Romantic entanglements are out of the question. I’ve never had a long-term boyfriend. During my summer internship in Philadelphia, I went out with a guy named Carmen, an Italian with an accent as thick as a milk shake. He was the first guy to ever tell me he loved me. The moment he said it—poof, I was gone. In my mind, boyfriends and long-term relationships require intimacy, not just physical but also emotional. I struggled with both. I don’t like seeing myself naked, much less someone else seeing me naked. I’ve never looked at myself in a mirror completely naked. I’m no prude. It’s not sex that I’m afraid of. It’s the emotion that accompanies all but the most temporary of relationships that scares me. When someone tries to get close, I hide or run away. Or both.

  I met “Roberto” at a party in D.C. in June 2012. We had dinner a couple of times, watched a movie once, and the flirtation got serious enough that he invited me to his apartment for Valentine’s Day and asked that I spend the night. When I arrived, he was making chicken for dinner. He then handed me two thoughtful gifts: a bottle of vitamin gummy bears (he knew that I spend too much time flying and that I love gummy bears), and a book of poems by Pablo Neruda. I was so caught up in my own world that I didn’t even think to bring him anything. After a few bites of the dinner he prepared, I told him I had to go. I grabbed my bag, headed to the door, and told him this was all too much.

  The whole thing was terrifying. We were just getting to know each other, but already I was removing myself from the situation. Even if I stayed, I knew I would have to leave, because leaving, for me, was an inevitability. I couldn’t bear the weight of that myself, much less impose it on someone else. Nothing was ever permanent, so I decided that leaving was better. Nothing is better. I thought coming out as undocumented, liberating myself from the lies and the need to pass, would make all of this better. I was wrong. Trading a private life that was in limbo for a public life that is still in limbo made it worse. In recent years, I’ve increasingly become a recluse, as if some part of me has already left, since I may have to leave anyway. I’ve started separating myself from people, even from my closest friends.

  None closer than Jake.

  I met Jake in 2007 at the Google headquarters, not too far from where I grew up. I was covering Ron Paul’s visit with Googlers. Jake was there to see just how popular Paul was among young libertarians. (Very.) Jake worked at Idealist, a one-stop resource for jobs and internships in the nonprofit realm. As it happened, Jake was an i
dealist himself, the kind of guy who walked around like he had his own personal sunlight. To him, everything was good, positive, ideal. It would have been unbearable if he hadn’t been so charming. I had just started my beat of covering the marriage of politics and technology, and Jake knew everyone who was anyone working in that emerging space. Though he was a Democrat, he hung around many Republicans. He even married a journalist and conservative commentator, Mary Katharine Ham. He was connected and he was a connector. Our friendship was sealed when he called me one very chilly night before the Iowa caucuses, and he coached me how to drive in the snow. “Dude, Jose, did you properly learn how to drive?”

  Three years after we met, over lattes at Caribou Coffee near downtown Washington, I shared my secret. I told him about my plan to start an organization that collected the stories of undocumented immigrants. He was sold—even though, up until we met, he didn’t know anyone who was undocumented.

  “Jose was the gay, Filipino brother I never had, and I was the white, American-heartland brother he never had. An awesomely odd couple to be sure,” Jake, who grew up in Tennessee, wrote on HuffPost. The headline: “My ‘Illegal’ Brother Defines American.” Jake’s outlook—the centrality of stories, the need for empathy, the importance of values as a way to connect with one another—was woven into the DNA of the organization.

  Despite the fact that Jake had a full-time job in Washington—at that point he was helping run Change.org, the world’s largest petition platform—he was just as committed to Define American. We were able to secure some funding and hire full-time staff. When we were looking for a campaign director, he recommended Ryan Eller, with whom he had previously worked at Change.org. Ryan, who was raised in Appalachia, is an expert digital organizer and all-around solid manager. An ordained Baptist minister, he lives in Kentucky. Together, we grew the organization, bringing on a diverse staff who looked like America, from different parts of the country. Whenever doubts clouded my mind, Jake was always my first call. I’d spent my entire life being obedient: good student, hardworking journalist, and now activist/advocate/whatever-this-was. I felt inadequate. He always told me I was enough, but I could never believe it.