Dear America Summary

Dear America is Jose Antonio Vargas’s memoir about his life as an undocumented immigrant in the United States. At age 12, he left the Philippines to join his grandparents in California. He soon learned that he wasn’t supposed to be there: his passport and green card were fake. He realized that his undocumented status would prevent him from working legally and leave him open to deportation at any time. This would make it nearly impossible for him to truly make the U.S. his home. But Vargas decided that the only solution was to try and “pass” as a U.S. citizen. It worked: he managed to attend college and become a successful journalist. But by 2011, the stress of hiding his status from friends, coworkers, and the public had become too overwhelming. Vargas decided to publicly come out as undocumented, and ever since, he has become one of the most prominent immigrant activists in the United States.

Vargas introduces Dear America by noting that, by the time his readers pick up his book, he might have already been deported—after all, undocumented people like him face more dangers during the Trump administration than ever before. Then, he explains how he became an undocumented immigrant in the first place. He was 12 years old in 1993, when his mother sent him on a plane from Manila, the capital of the Philippines, to California. She promised to follow him, but she couldn’t—in fact, they haven’t seen each other since. When Vargas arrived in the U.S., his grandparents (Lolo and Lola in Tagalog) threw him a welcome party and showered him with gifts, but he still felt out of place. He struggled with English and didn’t fit in at school. He couldn’t figure out the divide between Black, white, Latinx, and Asian students at his school, and he had no idea where Filipinos fit into the mix.

When he was sixteen, Vargas went to get a driver’s license at the DMV, but the woman behind the counter told him that his green card was fake. At home, Lolo confirmed that Vargas was in the U.S. illegally. But this was a long time in the making. Years earlier, Lolo and Lola, who were U.S. citizens, had petitioned for Vargas and his mother to join them in the U.S. But they lied about Vargas’s mother being single. When they realized that this lie could cause them serious legal problems, they withdrew their petition. This left no legal way for Vargas to come to the U.S., so Lola and Lolo brought him over with fake papers instead. They hoped that, once Vargas came of age, he would marry an American woman and become a citizen. There was just one problem: Vargas is gay. In high school, while he kept his immigration status a closely guarded secret, he quickly embraced his sexuality and came out of the closet.

Vargas figured that the best way to cope with being undocumented was to Americanize himself as much as possible. He obsessively watched American movies, read American magazines, and listened to American music. He also constantly asked questions, and one of his high school teachers suggested that he should think about becoming a journalist. He soon realized that she was right: he felt like journalism could be his “way of writing [him]self into America.” He started an internship at the local newspaper and even set up a job for himself after graduation. But the adults around him at school—the principal Pat Hyland, the superintendent Rich Fischer, and Fischer’s assistant, Mary Moore—were surprised and worried to hear that he wasn’t going to college. He eventually admitted the real reason: he was undocumented, so he couldn’t get financial aid. But Hyland, Fischer, and Moore found him a scholarship through the wealthy investor Jim Strand, and he enrolled at San Francisco State University. Before his first semester, he did an internship at the San Francisco Chronicle—but to get the position, he had to lie about his immigration status on the application. He repeated this lie to get internships at the Philadelphia Daily News and Washington Post during college. When he needed a driver’s license for the Post, Hyland, Fischer, Moore, and Strand helped him get one from Oregon, the only state that didn’t require proof of citizenship or legal residency.

After college, Vargas returned to work at The Washington Post. While he constantly worried that someone would find out about his immigration status, he loved his job and totally immersed himself in it. He covered technology and video games, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the Virginia Tech massacre. Later, he got to cover the 2008 presidential election and write a feature on Mark Zuckerberg. But when he got a phone call informing him that he had won a Pulitzer Prize, his first reaction was terror: he worried that someone would find out he was undocumented. Although he was very successful, he also felt deeply alienated—he couldn’t be honest with the people around him. In 2011, he decided he couldn’t lie anymore: it was time to come out as undocumented.

After consulting with several lawyers and celebrating his thirtieth birthday surrounded by friends, family, and colleagues—most of whom had never met each other—Vargas published the essay “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant” in The New York Times Magazine. He wanted to help Americans better understand how undocumented people live, and in his essay, he tried to give fellow journalists the details they needed to do serious, fact-based reporting about immigration. Vargas points out that the vast majority of Americans—including most prominent journalists—know next to nothing about the U.S. immigration system. For instance, most Americans don’t know that undocumented immigrants pay taxes. They don’t understand how the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened the U.S. up to further immigration from Asia while criminalizing undocumented immigration from Latin America. And most importantly, they don’t recognize that immigration is the demographic and historical foundation of the United States. As a result, they often view immigrants as nameless, faceless laborers, not full human beings with their own lives, rights, and needs.

After publishing his article, Vargas knew that he had to start using his public platform to advocate for other undocumented people. He co-founded the nonprofit organization Define American, which tries to change the stories told about immigration in the United States. He wrote an article about undocumented immigration for Time magazine and organized a photoshoot with 35 undocumented young people for the cover. And he appeared all over cable television—including on Fox News. Ultimately, Vargas became a well-known figure. People stopped him in public, most with praise, but some with disparaging insults and threats. Even progressives attacked him for not being poor or oppressed enough to represent the undocumented community.

Although he’s famous now, Vargas still struggles to feel safe and secure in the U.S. He faces all the same legal challenges as before and he can’t vote, travel outside the U.S., or access any public benefits. In part because of his precarious status and the pain of leaving his mother behind in the Philippines, he struggles to form close or committed relationships. After Donald Trump’s election, he left his apartment and started living in hotels across the country so that the government couldn’t easily deport him. At the same time, he also went to protest at Congress because he believes that true citizenship shouldn’t be about legal papers, but rather about people’s participation in their society and contributions to the common good.

And then, in 2014, Vargas ended up in an immigration jail, surrounded by terrified child refugees from Central America. He explains how the U.S. only started detaining immigrants, including asylum seekers, after the government started demonizing “illegal” immigrants and limiting their rights in the 1990s. Sitting in the detention facility, Vargas wondered if his time in the U.S. was finally up. He ended up there because he had gone to McAllen, Texas, near the U.S.-Mexico border, for a protest. The Border Patrol arrested him at a checkpoint in the airport and locked him up in the facility. But to his surprise, it eventually let him go. It helped that he was a famous journalist with powerful friends, and that sending him back to the Philippines was much harder than sending people across the border to Mexico. Still, this experience—especially meeting the young refugees—led him to reflect on the profound sacrifices that parents like his own mother make in order to send their children to the U.S. He still wonders whether it has all been worth it.