Define American: an interview with Jose Antonio Vargas.

PositionInterview

Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was formerly a I staff writer for The Washington Post, among other prominent publications. In a 2011 New York Times Magazine essay, he revealed himself to be an undocumented immigrant to promote public dialogue about immigration issues in the United States. He went on to produce a documentary, Documented, about his family history and launched the organization Define American with the goal of changing the conversation about immigration reform in the United States. Vargas spoke with the Journal from Los Angeles, California about his immigration story and some of the priorities he sees for his advocacy work today. (1)

Journal of International Affairs: In other interviews, you have discussed the fact that people have often assumed you are Mexican because your name is Jose. What reflections do you have on this? Do you feel as though people are often surprised that you are undocumented and from the Philippines?

Jose Antonio Vargas: Yes. To me, it is really just fascinating how instrumental the mainstream media has been in the narrowing of the immigration narrative. I do not think people understand that more than a million of the [estimated] 11.5 million undocumented Americans in this country are actually from Asia. But you do not hear about that; you do not hear about undocumented Germans or any Europeans or British people. I have met so many undocumented Europeans who feel guilty that, whenever this gets brought up, nobody thinks about them. They get a pass. They are not the ones getting pulled over. They are not the ones being asked for their papers. It raises the question, how does race play into that?

You can talk to documented American citizens of Mexican descent, and they can tell you that they feel completely trapped, even though they are documented and they are American citizens. What is really important to me is how do we get Irish people, German people, Eastern European Jews--how do we get them to recognize their own history and connect it to the circle of the Latino and Asian immigrants in this country?

It is really fascinating being in Los Angeles. I was in a neighborhood where nearly every residential house I saw, there was a Latino person mowing the lawn, or tending to the garden, or cleaning the window. This city would collapse without Mexican labor. And we dare to call them "illegal" and dare to question their patriotism, and at the same time dehumanize them.

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