Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen is the journalist and filmmaker Jose Antonio Vargas’s memoir about his life, work, and activism as an undocumented American. In 1993, at age 12, Vargas left his native Philippines to live with his grandparents (Lolo and Lola) in California. But four years later, he learned that he was undocumented. Nevertheless, he managed to attend college and become a wildly successful journalist: he covered the 2008 election for the Washington Post, interviewed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for The New Yorker, and even won a Pulitzer Prize. But despite this success, he continued to struggle against a paralyzing sense of fear, anxiety, and unbelonging. His career was built on a lie about his immigration status, and he knew that the government could deport him at any time, upending his life forever. In 2011, he decided to publicly come out as undocumented, and ever since, he has been a prominent voice in American immigration politics. But Dear America is less about politics than about how undocumented people seek a sense of belonging in a country that rejects them. Vargas argues that the U.S. needs more than just new immigration policies: it also needs “a new language around migration and the meaning of citizenship.” While he emphasizes that legal documents still make a life-or-death difference to millions of people, he concludes that true citizenship isn’t about a piece of paper. Rather, Vargas argues that real citizenship is about committing and contributing to one’s country, no matter one’s legal status.
Like many undocumented people, Vargas constantly feels that he doesn’t belong in America—which is an agonizing way to live. He felt out of place from the day he arrived in the U.S. He stood out at school, and he couldn’t figure out where Filipinos like him fit into the U.S.’s complicated racial hierarchy. At first, he tried to study and imitate American culture through movies, TV, magazines, and music. He hoped to eventually assimilate and be accepted. But when he learned that he was undocumented, he realized that others might never view him as belonging or deserving to be in the U.S. This shows how American attitudes about immigration prevent undocumented people from feeling truly at home in the U.S. Undocumented immigrants like Vargas also feel under siege in the U.S. because they actually are—they face serious legal barriers that prevent them from living free, safe, stable lives. Most importantly, they often live in constant fear of deportation, which threatens to separate them from their families, jobs, and communities—possibly for the rest of their lives. And there’s no way for them to escape this threat because there’s no process for them to “get legal.” Vargas’s constant, severe anxiety about his immigration status reveals the U.S. government’s message to undocumented people: they are “illegal,” they do not belong, and they are not wanted. In particular, political polarization in the U.S. is responsible for dehumanizing undocumented people. For instance, after Vargas came out as undocumented, his life suddenly became a political issue. Conservatives told him that he didn’t deserve to be in the U.S. and should be deported (or worse), while progressives attacked him for not being “oppressed enough” to represent the undocumented community. Everyone treated him as a political abstraction—a projection of their own imagination—and not a real human being. Because of the U.S.’s political climate, undocumented people’s rights are never fully protected and always up for public debate. Unsurprisingly, this leads many undocumented people to feel like they do not belong in their own country.
But while Americans constantly told Vargas that he didn’t belong, he learned that he still could find a sense of belonging in the U.S. by changing his own conception of citizenship. For most of his life, Vargas hoped to “earn” his citizenship—or prove his moral worth to society and receive papers and public acceptance in exchange. But after coming out as undocumented, he realized that he had this backwards: people already assumed that he wasn’t morally worthy because of his immigration status, and he couldn’t do anything to change this. If he wanted to feel at home in the U.S., it couldn’t be by convincing others to accept him. Instead, Vargas decided that he had to redefine citizenship for himself, rather than letting others keep defining it for him. He decided that real citizenship is “citizenship of participation”—or showing up to fight for the interests of his community and the public interest of his country as a whole. At an event, he further clarified his definition by saying, “I define American by the people who have been excluded from the promise of America.” In other words, being “American” isn’t about having the right papers, but rather striving for inclusion and equity in a diverse, unequal nation. This definition gave Vargas a new sense of identity and purpose, and it demonstrates how undocumented Americans can better find a sense of home and belonging if they redefine citizenship for themselves (instead of letting others do it for them).
Until immigration laws change for the better, Vargas argues, most undocumented Americans will still have to lie, hide, and pass as legal residents to survive. Nevertheless, he argues that they can still address the psychological burden of undocumented life by redefining citizenship for themselves. While Vargas still hasn’t gotten formal citizenship documents, he argues that he has become a U.S. citizen, because he learned to identify what citizenship truly means to him and embody that definition. (This is why he subtitles his book “Notes of an Undocumented Citizen.”) In fact, he thinks that undocumented immigrants aren’t the only people who have to define citizenship for themselves: so do native-born Americans, who still have to grapple with what belonging in their country truly means. This is why Vargas founded the organization Define American: he wants all Americans to question what citizenship really means, regardless of the papers they have.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Citizenship, Belonging, and Identity ThemeTracker
Citizenship, Belonging, and Identity Quotes in Dear America
I do not know where I will be when you read this book.
As I write this, a set of creased and folded papers sits on my desk, ten pages in all, issued to me by the Department of Homeland Security. “Warrant for Arrest of Alien,” reads the top right corner of the first page.
These are my first legal American papers, the first time immigration officers acknowledged my presence after arresting, detaining, then releasing me in the summer of 2014. I’ve been instructed to carry these documents with me wherever I go.
This is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book—at its core—is not about immigration at all. This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like me find ourselves in. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together and having to make new ones when you can’t. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home.
After twenty-five years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom.
As the Continental Airlines flight left the tarmac, I peeked outside the window. I had heard that my native Philippines, a country of over seven thousand islands, was an archipelago. I didn’t really understand what that meant until I saw the clusters of islands down below, surrounded by water. So much water, embracing so many islands, swallowing me up as the airplane soared through the sky.
To Lolo, America was something you wear, something you buy, something you eat, and he wanted to spoil his first and only grandson—me. It was consumption all around.
But my family is from the other Mountain View, which is part of the other Silicon Valley. This is the Mountain View of immigrant families who live in cramped houses and apartments, who depend on Univision, Saigon TV News, and the Filipino Channel for news of home, not the homes they’re living in but the homes they left behind. This is the Silicon Valley of ethnic grocery stores in nondescript and dilapidated buildings, where sacks of rice and pounds of pork are cheaper, where you hear some Spanish, Tagalog, and Vietnamese before you hear a word of English. This is the other Mountain View, in the other Silicon Valley, where the American Dream rests on the outdated and byzantine immigration system that requires families to wait for years, if not decades, to be reunited with their loved ones.
“Peke ba ito?” I asked in Tagalog. (“Is this fake?”) I held out the green card and searched his face as my voice cracked, afraid of what he might say.
Without addressing the question, he got up, swiped the card from my hand, and uttered a sentence that changed the course of my life.
“Huwag mong ipakita yang sa mga tao.” (“Don’t show it [the card] to people.”)
His voice was soft, soaking in shame.
“Hindi ka dapat nandito.” (“You are not supposed to be here.”)
There are many parts that make each of us whole. Since I didn’t know who to talk to, or what to do, or how to think about the “illegal” part of me, embracing the gay part kept me alive. If I had not accepted it as early as I did, I don’t know where I would be.
Ragtime connected dots I didn’t know existed, allowing me to better understand American history in ways my textbooks didn’t fully explain. I would learn that except for Native Americans, whose tribes were already here before the colonists and the Pilgrims landed, and African Americans, who were uprooted from their homes and imported to this country as slaves, everyone was an immigrant. I didn’t know what legal papers they had, or if they needed them, or if they were considered “illegals,” too, but white people were immigrants, like my family are immigrants.
I ended up watching Lola watch the movie, wondering how much she had given up to come here, how rarely she got to see her own daughter. At that moment, I realized it wasn’t just me who missed my mother—Lola longed for my mama, too. But I was too selfish to want to see it, too absorbed with my own pain.
I didn’t realize it then, but the more stories I reported on, the more people I interviewed, the more I realized that writing was the freest thing I could do, unencumbered by borders and legal documents and largely dependent on my skills and talent. Reporting, interviewing, and writing felt like the safest, surest place in my everyday reality. If I was not considered an American because I didn’t have the right papers, then practicing journalism—writing in English, interviewing Americans, making sense of the people and places around me—was my way of writing myself into America. In the beginning, writing was only a way of passing as an American. I never expected it to be an identity. Above all else, I write to exist, to make myself visible.
What would you have done? Work under the table? Stay under the radar? Not work at all?
Which box would you check?
What have you done to earn your box?
Besides being born at a certain place in a certain time, did you have to do anything?
Anything at all?
If you wanted to have a career, if you wanted to have a life, if you wanted to exist as a human being, what would you have done?
To pass as an American, I always had to question the law. Not just break it, not just circumvent it, but question it. I had to interrogate how laws are created, how illegality must be seen through the prism of who is defining what is legal for whom. I had to realize that throughout American history, legality has forever been a construct of power.
The master narrative is whatever ideological script that is being imposed by the people in authority on everybody else. The master fiction. History. It has a certain point of view. So, when these little girls see that the most prized gift that they can get at Christmastime is this little white doll, that’s the master narrative speaking. “This is beautiful, this is lovely, and you’re not it.”… She [Pecola Breedlove] is so needful, so completely needful, has so little, needs so much, she becomes the perfect victim.
As we walked down Montgomery Street, looking for his parked car, Rich broke the silence.
“You’re not going anywhere. You’re already here,” Rich said. “Put this problem on a shelf. Compartmentalize it. Keep going.”
I’m not sure where my life would have gone without those words. I pocketed and referenced them whenever any kind of doubt surfaced. Put this problem on a shelf. Compartmentalize it. Keep going.
Since the beginning of my journalism career, there was no escaping the fact that I was lying about myself so I could survive in a profession dependent on truth-telling.
In a way, winning a part of the prize was the beginning of the end. The lies had gotten so big that they swallowed everything up, including all the good things. The lies, I remember thinking that day, had to stop. I didn’t exactly know how to stop them or when to stop them or what I would do after I stopped them. I just knew that they had to stop.
Passing was purgatory. It was exhausting, always looking over your shoulder, waiting to get found out, always wondering if you’re not passing enough. Paranoia was like some viral disease that infected my whole body. Stress was oxygen.
I couldn’t be present for my own life. Even—no, especially—on a day like this.
Journalism was a way of separating what I do from who I am, a way of justifying my compromised, unlawful existence to myself: My name may be at the top of this story, I may have done all the reporting and the writing, but I’m not even supposed to be here, so I’m not really here.
Since I began writing, the three most dangerous words in the English language for me have been “I,” “me,” and “my.”
There comes a moment in each of our lives when we must confront the central truth in order for life to go on.
As people mingled with each other through the buffet dinner of chicken curry, samosas, biryani, and naan, I realized that I had made a mistake by keeping everyone apart all these years. I was afraid that they wouldn’t have anything to talk about. It was not until my family life, my school life, and my work life all converged in that Indian restaurant that I discovered that they indeed had something in common: their generosity to me.
And to be seen by so many people, so many good people, meant that I was here, and maybe even that I was supposed to be here.
“Jose, are you going to print that you’ve done things that are ‘unlawful’? In the New York Times?”
“Yes. It’s in the essay.”
“Jose, the moment you publish that, we cannot help you.”
“Jose, are you there?”
She took a big breath.
Telling the truth—admitting that I had lied on government forms to get jobs—meant that “getting legal” would be nearly impossible.
I took a big breath.
“If I can’t admit that, then why am I doing this?”
A longtime journalist who edited immigration for a regional news outlet told me: “Even when we report facts about undocumented immigrants, the readers either don’t care or don’t want to believe it. That’s how successful the right-wing sites have been.”
The overall result?
Immigrants are seen as mere labor, our physical bodies judged by perceptions of what we contribute, or what we take. Our existence is as broadly criminalized as it is commodified. I don’t how many times I’ve explained to a fellow journalist that even though it is an illegal act to enter the country without documents, it is not illegal for a person to be in the country without documents. That is a clear and crucial distinction. I am not a criminal. This is not a crime.
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?
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? […] 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.
I wanted to keep repeating: there is no line.
I wanted to scream, over and over again: THERE IS NO LINE! THERE IS NO LINE! THERE IS NO LINE!
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.
I refuse to let a presidency scare me from my own country. I refuse to live a life of fear defined by a government that doesn’t even know why it fears what it fears. Because I am not a citizen by law or by birth, I’ve had to create and hold on to a different kind of citizenship. Not exactly what President Shepard described as “advanced citizenship”—I don’t know what that meant—but something more akin to what I call citizenship of participation. Citizenship is showing up. Citizenship is using your voice while making sure you hear other people around you. Citizenship is how you live your life. Citizenship is resilience.
If I spoke Spanish, I could have told the boys about Ellis Island. About how the very first person in line on the opening day of America’s first immigration station—an unaccompanied minor named Annie Moore who traveled on a steamship from Ireland—was someone just like them. Except she was white, before she knew she was white.
If I spoke Spanish, I could have told the boys that none of this was their fault. I could have made sure they understood—even if most Americans do not—that people like us come to America because America was in our countries.
“Maybe,” Mama said, her voice growing fainter for a moment, “maybe it’s time to come home.”
