A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist talks immigration. Excerpted from Inforum’s “Jose Antonio Vargas: My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant,” July 11, 2011. JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS, Former Reporter, The Washington Post; Founder, Define American In conversation with PHIL BRONSTEIN,
Editor-at-Large, Hearst Newspapers BRONSTEIN: Tonight’s guest has been a highly successful journalist with a big secret. Jose Antonio Vargas was part of the Washington Post coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007. He’s gone on to report for the Huffington Post and a variety of prestigious publications, and he snagged a fabulous interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for The New Yorker. Everything was going well, and then three weeks
ago or so, he came out as an illegal immigrant. His credibility, objectivity, personal promotion and character have all been called into question. He was sent here at age 12 in 1993. He found out when he was 16 that his green card had been faked on a Xerox machine.
I hired Jose a while ago as a reporter, because I thought he was an extraordinarily talented young man. I didn’t ask him questions about his immigration status, and I pushed him for a job six months ago with the Hearst Corp. in New York, because I didn’t know then, nor could I figure out why he never followed up on the job interview. Before, Jose lived with a secret that was labeled a lie by people including me. Now he has the dubious distinction of celebrity by virtue of his confessional revelations.
We talk about immigrants, but we often talk about a certain kind of immigrant. How much are day laborers, who are often the public face of immigration, going to relate to you?
VARGAS: It’s been fascinating, hearing the shock from the media and newsroom world. It’s been, “How dare this immigrant get in this newsroom and not tell us.” The other part has been, “Oh, we thought we knew what undocumented immigrants were. We had this profile of what they were supposed to look like, or sound like, or be like.”
My question [to myself when deciding to do this] was, What purpose does this story serve? Which as a journalist is always the question. That’s why I decided to do this. Undocumented immigrants often are the day laborers and babysitters and people who make sure we eat lettuce. More than just that, the fact that we have been playing political football has led to the problem being this bad. The only thing I represent is just how incredibly dysfunctional this system is. A lot of other students and a lot of other people – 11 million of us – can tell you that much, from the day laborer to the kid at Stanford Law School. We are not who you think we are.
BRONSTEIN: What would you tell a kid who had a chance at an internship with a fake ID at the Chronicle, or The Washington Post, or came to you for advice?
VARGAS: They’re coming now, and I don’t know what to tell them. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. In Tagalog we have a saying that basically means, “Just hold on to the knife.” That’s basically what I’ve been doing. But I am not about to tell people to check boxes that they’re not supposed to check and go to a state to get a driver’s license. I made that choice, and I’m sorry for making that choice. I came to the Bay Area in February and met with a group called Educators for Fair Consideration. It was really the first time I got to meet with a lot of undocumented students. I had not yet divulged my status to them. It was really hard to look them in the eye, because I was in that spot seven years ago.
BRONSTEIN: At the Chronicle, we had a photographer and a reporter who were covering gay marriage right when it [was legalized], and they got married. We decided not that they had a bias we couldn’t overcome, but that they were directly involved in the story and therefore shouldn’t be covering it. We’re not only concerned about actual conflicts but also the appearance of conflicts.
The issue is that you’re now part of the story, and you’ve now created an advocacy organization. There’s a question about whether I’d assign you today to cover an immigration story. I probably wouldn’t, because you’re in the middle of the story, not because you have an opinion.
VARGAS: This question of objectivity, which doesn’t exist, is coming head to head with the reality that we are now living in a minority-majority country, in which minorities who, in many ways, are less of a part of newsrooms – most newsrooms in this country are still run by the same people who have been running them for all these years. Minorities are still not well represented in newsrooms.
BRONSTEIN: Why haven’t you been deported?
VARGAS: When I decided to do this, I knew that this was one of the first things I needed to figure out. What kind of legal advice would I need? I must have talked to about 25 lawyers, many of whom said that this is legal suicide. But I’m ready for everything that could happen. The government hasn’t done anything yet. I haven’t killed anyone or gotten a DUI. I haven’t given them any reason. I’m not high on the priority list in terms of somebody they’re going to target. But being public as I have been, this was a conscious decision on my part, saying, I’m just one story.
BRONSTEIN: Have you made representations? Do you have people who support you, who have talked to people in Immigration? Do you have inroads there that make you feel a little safer than maybe someone else?
VARGAS: From the legal perspective, it’s been really hard, because in many ways I’ve been playing legal offense. I don’t know what the government is going to do. We were having a big debate about whether I should pursue something that would just protect me, a private bill of sorts, that gets offered once in a while. We tried to pursue it to some extent to get me some protection, and one of our co-founders, Alicia Menendez, said, “You’re no use to this thing if you get deported, Jose, so we need to get you protection.” But I was like, “I don’t want to come out with this and then all of sudden, it’s going to look like I’m just out to save myself. That’s not the point.” The point was to make a statement and say that whatever situation I’m in, whoever I am and whatever I’ve achieved, I’m still one of these 11 million undocumented people. So we haven’t fully pursued that; I haven’t asked a senator or a congressman for a private bill. At the end of the day, I am not an exception.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: What do you define as an undocumented immigrant who deserves a path toward a green card or being able to stay here?
VARGAS: I was just on a roundtable with George Will, the conservative; he and I actually agreed. He said that every advanced degree in this country should come with a green card. George Will said this.
But not everybody has an advanced degree. What are we supposed to do with the day laborer just trying to make ends meet? And what do you think a lot of these undocumented students come home to when they come home from school? In many ways, the DREAM Act has been the biggest rallying cry, because it’s the most sympathetic. It’s the one that can make most sense, which is great. But again, I don’t think we’re asking the harder questions. Who are they going home to, and why are they here? We are not going to deport 11 million people in this country. Are we all just going to let them work in a shadow economy and let them live these kind of underground lives?
At the end of the day, as one of those 11 million people, I’d be more than happy to get in some sort of line, some sort of path. As somebody who’s been contributing to this country, as somebody who’s paying taxes and Social Security, I just want to be in whatever that line is.