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Part 3, Chapter 8: National Security Threat
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
In the McAllen Border Patrol Station, the agents kept moving Vargas around to different cells. A couple hours later, he was on the news, and an agent asked if he was famous. When he arrived and the agents took all of his possessions, he realized that immigration detention was clearly about power and control. In his cell, everything was quiet—for the first time, he had nothing to do and no deadline to fill. He reflected on never having had a real home and decided that he was in an abusive relationship with the United States. But then, he realized that the U.S. immigration system isn’t broken: it does exactly what it was designed for. But he wonders if this design is really what America wants for him.
Vargas’s experience at the immigration jail, where his treatment seemed both cruel and totally arbitrary, affirmed his longstanding belief that immigration policy isn’t really about serving the national interest. The system doesn’t clearly benefit anyone, and yet politicians specifically designed it this way. It attacks people who aren’t a threat in order to protect people who aren’t in danger. Vargas thinks that the immigration system really dominates and abuses citizens because this is how politicians can please constituents who know nothing about immigration. This is how political solutions to immigration became so disconnected from the actual problem: it became a question of politics, not policy. Thus, certain politicians will always call for more immigration enforcement in order to rally their supporters—regardless of whether more enforcement is needed, or whether immigration is really creating problems at all.
Themes
