Jose Antonio Vargas

Journalist, activist, and filmmaker Jose Antonio Vargas is frequently called the “most famous undocumented immigrant in America.” As he explains in Dear America, he was born in the Philippines and moved to California to live with his U.S. citizen grandparents at age 12. Four years later, when he tried to obtain a driver’s license, he learned that he was undocumented. Fortunately, a network of generous, caring adults helped him find a scholarship to attend San Francisco State University and then start a career in journalism. After internships at the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Daily News, and The Washington Post, Vargas went on to a full-time position at the Style section of the Post. He covered topics ranging from video games to the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting. In fact, he turned his HIV/AIDS coverage into a 2010 documentary, The Other City, and his team won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for their work on the Virginia Tech shooting. Vargas went on to cover the 2008 presidential campaign, with a particular focus on technology and social media. In 2009, he joined The Huffington Post, where he edited the paper’s technology and college sections. After years of silence on the subject, Vargas publicly revealed his immigration status in a 2011 essay for The New York Times Magazine. In the process, he became the most visible undocumented immigrant activist in the United States. The same year, Vargas also founded the nonprofit Define American, which spearheaded the successful push to replace the term “illegal” with “undocumented” in mainstream news. As he recounts in Dear America, he also wrote a major Time magazine cover story about undocumented immigrants in 2012, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2013, and was arrested by the Border Patrol in a high-profile case in McAllen, Texas in 2014. In addition to writing this book, he has spent the 2010s directing Define American and making films, including the film Documented about his own life and the documentary White People for MTV. As of 2021, he is currently working on his next book, White Is Not a Country, which is scheduled for publication in 2023.