Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Dear America, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Citizenship, Belonging, and Identity
Family, Love, and Intimacy
Immigration Politics and Policy
Journalism, Storytelling, and the Power of Truth
Summary
Analysis
Vargas believed that he was about to throw away his career when he published the 4,300 word essay “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant” in June 2011. Around the same time, he started the nonprofit Define American, which tries to change the stories told about undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
Vargas’s essay and Define American’s mission both reveal Vargas’s deep faith in the power of stories. Specifically, he hoped that, by exposing the public to different, more positive representations of undocumented people, he could help change immigration politics (and eventually immigration policy).
Themes
While Vargas was proofreading his essay, one of his immigration lawyers called him and explained that he would probably never get legal status if he admitted to breaking the law in his essay. But after spending a decade lying about who he was, Vargas knew that it was time to tell the truth. He thought that his essay’s benefits to the public would be worth whatever personal risks it posed to him. He carefully included key details that other journalists could use to study “the ‘why’ and ‘how’” of undocumented immigration.
By choosing to tell the truth about breaking the law, Vargas elected to prioritize his principles over self-preservation. Setting the record straight in his essay meant telling the full truth—this would be the only way for him to fully close the gap between his personal and professional lives. In his essay, beyond just presenting his own individual story, he also tried to address journalists’ general ignorance about immigration policy and undocumented people’s experiences, which he views as a key factor contributing to the U.S.’s failed immigration policies.
Themes
Vargas explains that undocumented immigrants pay billions in income taxes and to Social Security, either through fake Social Security numbers or legal Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers. But the news media often fails to report this information, which would help fight the myth that undocumented immigrants take away from social services and U.S. citizens. Because of this poor media coverage, many U.S. citizens see immigrants as mere laborers, but not real people. When Vargas publicized his story, many people started accusing him of having a biased “agenda.” He knew that people would respond to his writing, but not in such a politicized way. He asks why journalists pretend that it’s “objective” to treat people’s lives as just one of a story’s two sides.
Vargas gives an important, detailed example of how the media fuels misunderstandings about the U.S. immigration system, which fuel prejudice against immigrants. The common misconception that immigrants can access social services and don’t pay taxes—when it’s really the other way around—leads Americans to view immigrants as detracting from the U.S. economy (when they really contribute to it). In other words, reasonable ordinary people turn against immigrants because they are misinformed. This is only possible because U.S. citizens’ pro- and anti-immigration arguments are considered equally valid—regardless of whether they actually have a basis in fact. In contrast, actual immigrants’ arguments and experiences are viewed as too biased to warrant real consideration. Thus, the media locks immigrants out of the conversations that determine their fate.
Themes
The New Yorker wasn’t interested in publishing Vargas’s story, so he turned to the Washington Post instead. For three months, he worked with the perceptive, diligent editor Carlos Lozada to perfect his piece—and then the Post killed the story. The top editor didn’t even answer Vargas’s emails. So Vargas called up one of his old colleagues and got his essay into the New York Times instead.
The New Yorker and the Post’s reactions to Vargas’s article support Vargas’s hypothesis that news media organizations don’t take immigration seriously enough or treat undocumented people with the same humanity that they extend to citizens. Vargas clearly connects this to the power dynamics of media organizations, which are usually run by people with little serious personal or emotional investment in immigration.
Themes
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Vargas explains that journalists, like most Americans, simply don’t understand immigration. Moreover, there are very few Latinx journalists in the U.S., and TV journalism tends to omit key context. TV hosts like Erin Burnett and Bill Maher have asked Vargas why he can’t just get legal status—they don’t know that, under the current system, this is impossible. When NBC anchor Chuck Todd was about to interview Donald Trump about immigration, Vargas called Todd to inform him that Asian immigrants are the fastest growing undocumented population. Still, many Americans assume that all undocumented immigrants are Latinx.
Vargas points out a key paradox in the media coverage of immigration: the media constantly talks about immigration, but these conversations are almost never about concrete facts or actual policies. Rather, they’re about whether people who are already citizens are willing to extend the privileges of citizenship to others. But Vargas thinks this is the wrong question to ask and the wrong perspective to assume. He argues that citizens haven’t done anything special to deserve the privileges of U.S. citizenship, so they aren’t morally superior to immigrants and don’t have an inherent right to judge different immigrants’ worthiness. And he argues that, if the media didn’t assume a citizen’s perspective as its default, then it would take the needs and interests of immigrants themselves into account, instead of just asking whether immigration is good or bad for the white majority. He hopes that giving immigrants and minority groups more power in the media can help resolve both of these issues.
Themes
Overall, the media hasn’t helped Americans understand the millions of immigrants, documented and undocumented, who live in the U.S. Most Americans don’t know that most of these immigrants are now Asian and Latinx because of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which the civil rights movement made possible. Unsurprisingly, Trump yearns to return to the 1950s, when Black Americans didn’t have civil rights and nonwhite people couldn’t immigrate to the U.S.
By focusing too narrowly on current political debates, the media forgets the facts, context, and history that are necessary to truly understand immigration. This is why Vargas emphasizes the way specific policy decisions in the past have shaped the present breakdown of immigration in the U.S. In turn, this shows that the U.S. has the power to either fix or worsen the policies that cause undocumented people so much suffering today. Indeed, by taking history into account, the stakes of Trump’s politics become much clearer: Vargas argues that Trump wants to reinforce white racial domination by reversing policies that have allowed nonwhite people to make the U.S. their home.
Themes
In his book A Nation of Immigrants, President John F. Kennedy pointed out that 42 million immigrants had come to the U.S. by 1958. Vargas notes that another 43 million came in the following five decades. This has radically transformed the U.S., but most newsrooms are run by and filled with white journalists who don’t challenge racism (even when it comes from President Trump). Vargas asks when the American public will finally confront the question of who does and doesn’t have rights in the U.S.
Kennedy’s book and Vargas’s statistics show that immigration is a driving force in American life and politics. By transforming the U.S.’s demographics, immigration also inevitably transforms American identity—which is why political debates over immigration are almost always really about which racial and ethnic groups get to control social, cultural, economic, and political power in the U.S. In turn, this is why Vargas wants the media to start treating immigration and xenophobia seriously, as core issues in U.S. politics, and stop compartmentalizing them as identity issues.
Themes
Immigrants aren’t the only people excluded from full rights in the U.S. Vargas remembers visiting the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and meeting an old Black woman in North Carolina who still had her great-great-grandmother’s bill of sale. After Hurricane Maria, a young man from Puerto Rico wrote Vargas to say that his citizenship wasn’t enough to save him. Vargas points out that the U.S. seized Puerto Rico and the Philippines in the same year—it just never let Puerto Rico go.
Vargas explicitly connects the undocumented experience to the experiences of other marginalized groups in the U.S. By doing so, he shows that these groups share common political interests and suggests that taking immigration seriously can be a jumping-off point for journalists and political movements to take other Americans’ needs seriously, too. He also further supports his thesis that immigration is not a fringe identity issue that only affects certain groups, but rather one of the most important issues shaping American identity in the 21st century.
Themes
