The U.S. is famously known as a country of immigrants, but Jose Antonio Vargas argues that its immigration system is an “outdated and byzantine” nightmare that meets almost nobody’s needs. It ruins countless lives, wastes billions of dollars, and distracts Americans from passing laws that would actually improve their country. At the same time, in another sense, the system isn’t broken at all: it’s working just as intended. It’s the result of the executive branch faithfully implementing leaders’ policy choices over the course of decades. This is the paradox at the heart of immigration in the U.S.: the system is absurd and almost nobody is happy with it, but it’s also working exactly as designed. While Dear America focuses on Vargas’s personal experiences with the immigration system, it also explains how and why the system became so broken. Vargas contends that the system doesn’t protect Americans and it doesn’t help immigrants because, at its base, that’s not really what it’s designed to do. Immigration, he argues, is now more about politics than policy. In other words, politicians don’t implement new immigration policies to benefit the country, but rather to score points with their constituents—usually by attacking immigrants, who are perceived as enemies. Vargas argues that this dynamic explains why the U.S. immigration system is becoming crueler and more dysfunctional over time.
Vargas argues that the U.S. immigration system is needlessly brutal, unjust, and illogical. First, it’s wildly inefficient. For instance, the government spends hundreds of billions of dollars on border enforcement, even though this has scarcely reduced immigration, and unnecessarily imprisons immigrants with minor criminal records, which costs billions more. It wastes resources and uses unnecessary violence against nonviolent immigrants, with no discernible positive effect. Similarly, the immigration system actually damages the U.S. economy, harming even citizens. It costs the U.S. much of its best talent, not to mention billions of dollars. Vargas points out that, if the eleven million undocumented people in the U.S. could get legal work permits, they could contribute far more to the nation than they do today. In fact, his own journalism career proves that undocumented immigrants can achieve great things if they can enter the legal job market. Thus, the U.S. actually hampers itself economically by spending so much time, energy, and money on immigration enforcement. Finally and most importantly, the way the U.S. government treats immigrants is deeply unjust and unethical. For instance, eleven million undocumented people constantly fear deportation and have no clear pathway to citizenship, even though they pay taxes, contribute to Social Security, and keep crucial U.S. industries like agriculture and construction afloat. When they cross the southern border, asylum seekers are arrested, detained, and deported without due process. These are just a few of the numerous injustices that Vargas catalogues throughout Dear America, and they are the strongest moral reason why he believes that readers should oppose the current immigration system.
Vargas argues that the immigration system became so dysfunctional because it isn’t actually designed to regulate immigration—instead of a policy tool to help the nation, over time, it has become a political tool that leaders use to score points with their constituents. Vargas notes that the modern U.S. immigration system started during the “tough on crime” era of the 1990s, when President Clinton competed with congressional and state Republicans to see who could pass the harshest immigration laws. Rather than trying to actually regulate immigration, these laws were designed to show the public how much each party was willing to punish immigrants. Vargas argues that this trend has continued: immigrants are seen as “unworthy,” so the major parties try to win political support by treating them as cruelly as possible. While Donald Trump’s political career is the clearest example of this trend, Vargas notes that President Obama also greatly ramped up deportations in order to fight the allegation that he was too pro-immigration. This pattern suggests that politicians actually get rewarded for cruelty to immigrants—which is why they make the U.S. immigration system more and more cruel over time.
Finally, Americans’ views about immigrants clearly show immigration policy has been divorced from reality. For instance, Vargas points out that most Americans assume that immigrants unfairly draw from social services without contributing, when in reality, it’s exactly the opposite: immigrants pay income taxes and support the Social Security system, but can’t benefit from them. Even people who pose as immigration experts deny basic facts about the system. For instance, anti-immigration activists, progressive TV hosts, and even immigration lawyers have all told him he should “get in line” for a legal green card, when the government offers literally no process for doing so. These examples show that immigration debates in the U.S. deliberately distort the truth and happen in bad faith. These debates aren’t really about how the U.S. can create effective immigration policies, but rather about different groups of citizens, politicians, and commentators trying to punish foreigners in order to win political support.
Ultimately, Vargas argues, the U.S. immigration system functions poorly because it’s designed not to work. By failing to regulate the flow of immigrants, admit them into the U.S. in a fair and orderly way, and respect people’s basic rights, it generates further outrage and enables further cruelty. Because immigration policy is inherently punitive in the U.S., it’s little surprise that the U.S.-Mexico border has gotten increasingly militarized, and that undocumented immigrants have gotten increasingly vilified over the last few decades. Reversing this dangerous trend requires changing the way Americans approach immigrants and policy conversations about them in the first place. And while this political mission is far from easy, Vargas believes that he’s up to the challenge.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Immigration Politics and Policy ThemeTracker
Immigration Politics and Policy 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.
Still, if the Philippines was America’s “first real temptation,” as Mark Twain wrote, then America, given its imperialist history, also became a temptation for Filipinos eager to escape poverty and provide for their families. After all, if Americans could come and claim the Philippines, why can’t Filipinos move to America?
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.”)
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
At the Texas border, “border security” is an inescapable daily reality, a physical and existential reminder of where you cannot go, what your limitations are. “Border security” means running random checkpoints anywhere within one hundred miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, a Constitution-free zone in which agents can stop your car, inspect your belongings, and ask for your papers, regardless of your immigration status. (The Fourth Amendment does not allow for citizens to be subjected to random search and seizures, but in the interest of “national security,” the Fourth Amendment does not apply within a hundred miles of the border.) For residents of the Rio Grande Valley who are undocumented, or who are U.S. citizens but live with parents or siblings who are undocumented, “border security” means knowing you can’t drive for more than half an hour south, no more than an hour and a half east, and no more than two hours north.
Sitting alone in that cell, I concluded that none of this was an accident. None of it. You know how politicians and the news media that cover them like to say that we have a “broken immigration system”? Inside that cell I came to the conclusion that we do not have a broken immigration system. We don’t. […] This immigration system is set up to do exactly what it does.
Dear America, is this what you really want? Do you even know what is happening in your name?
I don’t know what else you want from us.
I don’t know what else you need us to do.
Sitting on the floor, staring at the boys in the cell, I kept thinking of their parents, the fear they must have felt knowing that they needed to do what they needed to do. I also kept thinking of my mother, wondering as I had so many times over all these years what she told herself as she said good-bye to me at that airport twenty-five years ago.
“Maybe,” Mama said, her voice growing fainter for a moment, “maybe it’s time to come home.”
