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发帖数: 507 | 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/magazine/my-life-as-an-undocu
The author is also trying to get support at
http://www.change.org/petitions/stand-with-me-jose-antonio-varg
My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant
By JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS
Published: June 22, 2011
One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a
cab. She handed me a jacket. “Baka malamig doon” were among the few words
she said. (“It might be cold there.”) When I arrived at the Philippines’
Ninoy Aquino International Airport with her, my aunt and a family friend, I
was introduced to a man I’d never seen. They told me he was my uncle. He
held my hand as I boarded an airplane for the first time. It was 1993, and I
was 12.
Enlarge This Image
Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times
Related
The 6th Floor Blog: My (Legal) Editor's Dream (June 22, 2011)
Enlarge This Image
Staying Papers The documentation that Vargas obtained over the years — a
fake green card, a fake passport, a driver’s license — allowed him to
remain in the U.S. In Oregon, a friend provided a mailing address.
Enlarge This Image
Photograph from Jose Antonio Vargas
Pre-Flight In the Philippines with his mother, who was supposed to follow
him to the United States but never did.
Enlarge This Image
Photograph from Jose Antonio Vargas
Benefactors Vargas with the school officials Rich Fischer and Pat Hyland at
his high-school graduation.
Enlarge This Image
Photograph from Jose Antonio Vargas
After his college graduation with his grandfather, Lolo, who provided most
of his resources for his journey to America.
Enlarge This Image
Above A doctored version of this card has helped keep Vargas in the United
States. The magazine has blurred his number in the photo.
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My mother wanted to give me a better life, so she sent me thousands of miles
away to live with her parents in America — my grandfather (Lolo in Tagalog
) and grandmother (Lola). After I arrived in Mountain View, Calif., in the
San Francisco Bay Area, I entered sixth grade and quickly grew to love my
new home, family and culture. I discovered a passion for language, though it
was hard to learn the difference between formal English and American slang.
One of my early memories is of a freckled kid in middle school asking me,
“What’s up?” I replied, “The sky,” and he and a couple of other kids
laughed. I won the eighth-grade spelling bee by memorizing words I couldn’t
properly pronounce. (The winning word was “indefatigable.”)
One day when I was 16, I rode my bike to the nearby D.M.V. office to get my
driver’s permit. Some of my friends already had their licenses, so I
figured it was time. But when I handed the clerk my green card as proof of U
.S. residency, she flipped it around, examining it. “This is fake,” she
whispered. “Don’t come back here again.”
Confused and scared, I pedaled home and confronted Lolo. I remember him
sitting in the garage, cutting coupons. I dropped my bike and ran over to
him, showing him the green card. “Peke ba ito?” I asked in Tagalog. (“Is
this fake?”) My grandparents were naturalized American citizens — he
worked as a security guard, she as a food server — and they had begun
supporting my mother and me financially when I was 3, after my father’s
wandering eye and inability to properly provide for us led to my parents’
separation. Lolo was a proud man, and I saw the shame on his face as he told
me he purchased the card, along with other fake documents, for me. “Don’t
show it to other people,” he warned.
I decided then that I could never give anyone reason to doubt I was an
American. I convinced myself that if I worked enough, if I achieved enough,
I would be rewarded with citizenship. I felt I could earn it.
I’ve tried. Over the past 14 years, I’ve graduated from high school and
college and built a career as a journalist, interviewing some of the most
famous people in the country. On the surface, I’ve created a good life. I’
ve lived the American dream.
But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different
kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It
means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am
. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them
on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means
reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And
it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of
supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.
Last year I read about four students who walked from Miami to Washington to
lobby for the Dream Act, a nearly decade-old immigration bill that would
provide a path to legal permanent residency for young people who have been
educated in this country. At the risk of deportation — the Obama
administration has deported almost 800,000 people in the last two years —
they are speaking out. Their courage has inspired me.
There are believed to be 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United
States. We’re not always who you think we are. Some pick your strawberries
or care for your children. Some are in high school or college. And some, it
turns out, write news articles you might read. I grew up here. This is my
home. Yet even though I think of myself as an American and consider America
my country, my country doesn’t think of me as one of its own.
My first challenge was the language. Though I learned English in the
Philippines, I wanted to lose my accent. During high school, I spent hours
at a time watching television (especially “Frasier,” “Home Improvement”
and reruns of “The Golden Girls”) and movies (from “Goodfellas” to “
Anne of Green Gables”), pausing the VHS to try to copy how various
characters enunciated their words. At the local library, I read magazines,
books and newspapers — anything to learn how to write better. Kathy Dewar,
my high-school English teacher, introduced me to journalism. From the moment
I wrote my first article for the student paper, I convinced myself that
having my name in print — writing in English, interviewing Americans —
validated my presence here.
The debates over “illegal aliens” intensified my anxieties. In 1994, only
a year after my flight from the Philippines, Gov. Pete Wilson was re-elected
in part because of his support for Proposition 187, which prohibited
undocumented immigrants from attending public school and accessing other
services. (A federal court later found the law unconstitutional.) After my
encounter at the D.M.V. in 1997, I grew more aware of anti-immigrant
sentiments and stereotypes: they don’t want to assimilate, they are a drain
on society. They’re not talking about me, I would tell myself. I have
something to contribute.
To do that, I had to work — and for that, I needed a Social Security number
. Fortunately, my grandfather had already managed to get one for me. Lolo
had always taken care of everyone in the family. He and my grandmother
emigrated legally in 1984 from Zambales, a province in the Philippines of
rice fields and bamboo houses, following Lolo’s sister, who married a
Filipino-American serving in the American military. She petitioned for her
brother and his wife to join her. When they got here, Lolo petitioned for
his two children — my mother and her younger brother — to follow them. But
instead of mentioning that my mother was a married woman, he listed her as
single. Legal residents can’t petition for their married children. Besides,
Lolo didn’t care for my father. He didn’t want him coming here too.
But soon Lolo grew nervous that the immigration authorities reviewing the
petition would discover my mother was married, thus derailing not only her
chances of coming here but those of my uncle as well. So he withdrew her
petition. After my uncle came to America legally in 1991, Lolo tried to get
my mother here through a tourist visa, but she wasn’t able to obtain one.
That’s when she decided to send me. My mother told me later that she
figured she would follow me soon. She never did.
The “uncle” who brought me here turned out to be a coyote, not a relative,
my grandfather later explained. Lolo scraped together enough money — I
eventually learned it was $4,500, a huge sum for him — to pay him to
smuggle me here under a fake name and fake passport. (I never saw the
passport again after the flight and have always assumed that the coyote kept
it.) After I arrived in America, Lolo obtained a new fake Filipino passport
, in my real name this time, adorned with a fake student visa, in addition
to the fraudulent green card.
Using the fake passport, we went to the local Social Security Administration
office and applied for a Social Security number and card. It was, I
remember, a quick visit. When the card came in the mail, it had my full,
real name, but it also clearly stated: “Valid for work only with I.N.S.
authorization.”
When I began looking for work, a short time after the D.M.V. incident, my
grandfather and I took the Social Security card to Kinko’s, where he
covered the “I.N.S. authorization” text with a sliver of white tape. We
then made photocopies of the card. At a glance, at least, the copies would
look like copies of a regular, unrestricted Social Security card.
Lolo always imagined I would work the kind of low-paying jobs that
undocumented people often take. (Once I married an American, he said, I
would get my real papers, and everything would be fine.) But even menial
jobs require documents, so he and I hoped the doctored card would work for
now. The more documents I had, he said, the better.
While in high school, I worked part time at Subway, then at the front desk
of the local Y.M.C.A., then at a tennis club, until I landed an unpaid
internship at The Mountain View Voice, my hometown newspaper. First I
brought coffee and helped around the office; eventually I began covering
city-hall meetings and other assignments for pay.
For more than a decade of getting part-time and full-time jobs, employers
have rarely asked to check my original Social Security card. When they did,
I showed the photocopied version, which they accepted. Over time, I also
began checking the citizenship box on my federal I-9 employment eligibility
forms. (Claiming full citizenship was actually easier than declaring
permanent resident “green card” status, which would have required me to
provide an alien registration number.)
This deceit never got easier. The more I did it, the more I felt like an
impostor, the more guilt I carried — and the more I worried that I would
get caught. But I kept doing it. I needed to live and survive on my own, and
I decided this was the way.
Mountain View High School became my second home. I was elected to represent
my school at school-board meetings, which gave me the chance to meet and
befriend Rich Fischer, the superintendent for our school district. I joined
the speech and debate team, acted in school plays and eventually became co-
editor of The Oracle, the student newspaper. That drew the attention of my
principal, Pat Hyland. “You’re at school just as much as I am,” she told
me. Pat and Rich would soon become mentors, and over time, almost surrogate
parents for me.
After a choir rehearsal during my junior year, Jill Denny, the choir
director, told me she was considering a Japan trip for our singing group. I
told her I couldn’t afford it, but she said we’d figure out a way. I
hesitated, and then decided to tell her the truth. “It’s not really the
money,” I remember saying. “I don’t have the right passport.” When she
assured me we’d get the proper documents, I finally told her. “I can’t
get the right passport,” I said. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
She understood. So the choir toured Hawaii instead, with me in tow. (Mrs.
Denny and I spoke a couple of months ago, and she told me she hadn’t wanted
to leave any student behind.)
Later that school year, my history class watched a documentary on Harvey
Milk, the openly gay San Francisco city official who was assassinated. This
was 1999, just six months after Matthew Shepard’s body was found tied to a
fence in Wyoming. During the discussion, I raised my hand and said something
like: “I’m sorry Harvey Milk got killed for being gay. . . . I’ve been
meaning to say this. . . . I’m gay.”
I hadn’t planned on coming out that morning, though I had known that I was
gay for several years. With that announcement, I became the only openly gay
student at school, and it caused turmoil with my grandparents. Lolo kicked
me out of the house for a few weeks. Though we eventually reconciled, I had
disappointed him on two fronts. First, as a Catholic, he considered
homosexuality a sin and was embarrassed about having “ang apo na bakla” (
“a grandson who is gay”). Even worse, I was making matters more difficult
for myself, he said. I needed to marry an American woman in order to gain a
green card.
Tough as it was, coming out about being gay seemed less daunting than coming
out about my legal status. I kept my other secret mostly hidden.
While my classmates awaited their college acceptance letters, I hoped to get
a full-time job at The Mountain View Voice after graduation. It’s not that
I didn’t want to go to college, but I couldn’t apply for state and
federal financial aid. Without that, my family couldn’t afford to send me.
But when I finally told Pat and Rich about my immigration “problem” — as
we called it from then on — they helped me look for a solution. At first,
they even wondered if one of them could adopt me and fix the situation that
way, but a lawyer Rich consulted told him it wouldn’t change my legal
status because I was too old. Eventually they connected me to a new
scholarship fund for high-potential students who were usually the first in
their families to attend college. Most important, the fund was not concerned
with immigration status. I was among the first recipients, with the
scholarship covering tuition, lodging, books and other expenses for my
studies at San Francisco State University.
As a college freshman, I found a job working part time at The San Francisco
Chronicle, where I sorted mail and wrote some freelance articles. My
ambition was to get a reporting job, so I embarked on a series of
internships. First I landed at The Philadelphia Daily News, in the summer of
2001, where I covered a drive-by shooting and the wedding of the 76ers star
Allen Iverson. Using those articles, I applied to The Seattle Times and got
an internship for the following summer.
But then my lack of proper documents became a problem again. The Times’s
recruiter, Pat Foote, asked all incoming interns to bring certain paperwork
on their first day: a birth certificate, or a passport, or a driver’s
license plus an original Social Security card. I panicked, thinking my
documents wouldn’t pass muster. So before starting the job, I called Pat
and told her about my legal status. After consulting with management, she
called me back with the answer I feared: I couldn’t do the internship.
This was devastating. What good was college if I couldn’t then pursue the
career I wanted? I decided then that if I was to succeed in a profession
that is all about truth-telling, I couldn’t tell the truth about myself.
After this episode, Jim Strand, the venture capitalist who sponsored my
scholarship, offered to pay for an immigration lawyer. Rich and I went to
meet her in San Francisco’s financial district.
I was hopeful. This was in early 2002, shortly after Senators Orrin Hatch,
the Utah Republican, and Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat, introduced the
Dream Act — Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors. It seemed
like the legislative version of what I’d told myself: If I work hard and
contribute, things will work out.
But the meeting left me crushed. My only solution, the lawyer said, was to
go back to the Philippines and accept a 10-year ban before I could apply to
return legally.
If Rich was discouraged, he hid it well. “Put this problem on a shelf,” he
told me. “Compartmentalize it. Keep going.”
And I did. For the summer of 2003, I applied for internships across the
country. Several newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, The Boston
Globe and The Chicago Tribune, expressed interest. But when The Washington
Post offered me a spot, I knew where I would go. And this time, I had no
intention of acknowledging my “problem.”
The Post internship posed a tricky obstacle: It required a driver’s license
. (After my close call at the California D.M.V., I’d never gotten one.) So
I spent an afternoon at The Mountain View Public Library, studying various
states’ requirements. Oregon was among the most welcoming — and it was
just a few hours’ drive north.
Again, my support network came through. A friend’s father lived in Portland
, and he allowed me to use his address as proof of residency. Pat, Rich and
Rich’s longtime assistant, Mary Moore, sent letters to me at that address.
Rich taught me how to do three-point turns in a parking lot, and a friend
accompanied me to Portland.
The license meant everything to me — it would let me drive, fly and work.
But my grandparents worried about the Portland trip and the Washington
internship. While Lola offered daily prayers so that I would not get caught,
Lolo told me that I was dreaming too big, risking too much.
I was determined to pursue my ambitions. I was 22, I told them, responsible
for my own actions. But this was different from Lolo’s driving a confused
teenager to Kinko’s. I knew what I was doing now, and I knew it wasn’t
right. But what was I supposed to do?
I was paying state and federal taxes, but I was using an invalid Social
Security card and writing false information on my employment forms. But that
seemed better than depending on my grandparents or on Pat, Rich and Jim —
or returning to a country I barely remembered. I convinced myself all would
be O.K. if I lived up to the qualities of a “citizen”: hard work, self-
reliance, love of my country.
At the D.M.V. in Portland, I arrived with my photocopied Social Security
card, my college I.D., a pay stub from The San Francisco Chronicle and my
proof of state residence — the letters to the Portland address that my
support network had sent. It worked. My license, issued in 2003, was set to
expire eight years later, on my 30th birthday, on Feb. 3, 2011. I had eight
years to succeed professionally, and to hope that some sort of immigration
reform would pass in the meantime and allow me to stay.
It seemed like all the time in the world.
My summer in Washington was exhilarating. I was intimidated to be in a major
newsroom but was assigned a mentor — Peter Perl, a veteran magazine writer
— to help me navigate it. A few weeks into the internship, he printed out
one of my articles, about a guy who recovered a long-lost wallet, circled
the first two paragraphs and left it on my desk. “Great eye for details —
awesome!” he wrote. Though I didn’t know it then, Peter would become one
more member of my network.
At the end of the summer, I returned to The San Francisco Chronicle. My plan
was to finish school — I was now a senior — while I worked for The
Chronicle as a reporter for the city desk. But when The Post beckoned again,
offering me a full-time, two-year paid internship that I could start when I
graduated in June 2004, it was too tempting to pass up. I moved back to
Washington.
About four months into my job as a reporter for The Post, I began feeling
increasingly paranoid, as if I had “illegal immigrant” tattooed on my
forehead — and in Washington, of all places, where the debates over
immigration seemed never-ending. I was so eager to prove myself that I
feared I was annoying some colleagues and editors — and worried that any
one of these professional journalists could discover my secret. The anxiety
was nearly paralyzing. I decided I had to tell one of the higher-ups about
my situation. I turned to Peter.
By this time, Peter, who still works at The Post, had become part of
management as the paper’s director of newsroom training and professional
development. One afternoon in late October, we walked a couple of blocks to
Lafayette Square, across from the White House. Over some 20 minutes, sitting
on a bench, I told him everything: the Social Security card, the driver’s
license, Pat and Rich, my family.
Peter was shocked. “I understand you 100 times better now,” he said. He
told me that I had done the right thing by telling him, and that it was now
our shared problem. He said he didn’t want to do anything about it just yet
. I had just been hired, he said, and I needed to prove myself. “When you’
ve done enough,” he said, “we’ll tell Don and Len together.” (Don Graham
is the chairman of The Washington Post Company; Leonard Downie Jr. was then
the paper’s executive editor.) A month later, I spent my first
Thanksgiving in Washington with Peter and his family.
In the five years that followed, I did my best to “do enough.” I was
promoted to staff writer, reported on video-game culture, wrote a series on
Washington’s H.I.V./AIDS epidemic and covered the role of technology and
social media in the 2008 presidential race. I visited the White House, where
I interviewed senior aides and covered a state dinner — and gave the
Secret Service the Social Security number I obtained with false documents.
I did my best to steer clear of reporting on immigration policy but couldn’
t always avoid it. On two occasions, I wrote about Hillary Clinton’s
position on driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants. I also wrote an
article about Senator Mel Martinez of Florida, then the chairman of the
Republican National Committee, who was defending his party’s stance toward
Latinos after only one Republican presidential candidate — John McCain, the
co-author of a failed immigration bill — agreed to participate in a debate
sponsored by Univision, the Spanish-language network.
It was an odd sort of dance: I was trying to stand out in a highly
competitive newsroom, yet I was terrified that if I stood out too much, I’d
invite unwanted scrutiny. I tried to compartmentalize my fears, distract
myself by reporting on the lives of other people, but there was no escaping
the central conflict in my life. Maintaining a deception for so long
distorts your sense of self. You start wondering who you’ve become, and why.
In April 2008, I was part of a Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for the
paper’s coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings a year earlier. Lolo died a
year earlier, so it was Lola who called me the day of the announcement. The
first thing she said was, “Anong mangyayari kung malaman ng mga tao?”
What will happen if people find out?
I couldn’t say anything. After we got off the phone, I rushed to the
bathroom on the fourth floor of the newsroom, sat down on the toilet and
cried.
In the summer of 2009, without ever having had that follow-up talk with top
Post management, I left the paper and moved to New York to join The
Huffington Post. I met Arianna Huffington at a Washington Press Club
Foundation dinner I was covering for The Post two years earlier, and she
later recruited me to join her news site. I wanted to learn more about Web
publishing, and I thought the new job would provide a useful education.
Still, I was apprehensive about the move: many companies were already using
E-Verify, a program set up by the Department of Homeland Security that
checks if prospective employees are eligible to work, and I didn’t know if
my new employer was among them. But I’d been able to get jobs in other
newsrooms, I figured, so I filled out the paperwork as usual and succeeded
in landing on the payroll.
While I worked at The Huffington Post, other opportunities emerged. My H.I.V
./AIDS series became a documentary film called “The Other City,” which
opened at the Tribeca Film Festival last year and was broadcast on Showtime.
I began writing for magazines and landed a dream assignment: profiling
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for The New Yorker.
The more I achieved, the more scared and depressed I became. I was proud of
my work, but there was always a cloud hanging over it, over me. My old eight
-year deadline — the expiration of my Oregon driver’s license — was
approaching.
After slightly less than a year, I decided to leave The Huffington Post. In
part, this was because I wanted to promote the documentary and write a book
about online culture — or so I told my friends. But the real reason was,
after so many years of trying to be a part of the system, of focusing all my
energy on my professional life, I learned that no amount of professional
success would solve my problem or ease the sense of loss and displacement I
felt. I lied to a friend about why I couldn’t take a weekend trip to Mexico
. Another time I concocted an excuse for why I couldn’t go on an all-
expenses-paid trip to Switzerland. I have been unwilling, for years, to be
in a long-term relationship because I never wanted anyone to get too close
and ask too many questions. All the while, Lola’s question was stuck in my
head: What will happen if people find out?
Early this year, just two weeks before my 30th birthday, I won a small
reprieve: I obtained a driver’s license in the state of Washington. The
license is valid until 2016. This offered me five more years of acceptable
identification — but also five more years of fear, of lying to people I
respect and institutions that trusted me, of running away from who I am.
I’m done running. I’m exhausted. I don’t want that life anymore.
So I’ve decided to come forward, own up to what I’ve done, and tell my
story to the best of my recollection. I’ve reached out to former bosses and
employers and apologized for misleading them — a mix of humiliation and
liberation coming with each disclosure. All the people mentioned in this
article gave me permission to use their names. I’ve also talked to family
and friends about my situation and am working with legal counsel to review
my options. I don’t know what the consequences will be of telling my story.
I do know that I am grateful to my grandparents, my Lolo and Lola, for
giving me the chance for a better life. I’m also grateful to my other
family — the support network I found here in America — for encouraging me
to pursue my dreams.
It’s been almost 18 years since I’ve seen my mother. Early on, I was mad
at her for putting me in this position, and then mad at myself for being
angry and ungrateful. By the time I got to college, we rarely spoke by phone
. It became too painful; after a while it was easier to just send money to
help support her and my two half-siblings. My sister, almost 2 years old
when I left, is almost 20 now. I’ve never met my 14-year-old brother. I
would love to see them.
Not long ago, I called my mother. I wanted to fill the gaps in my memory
about that August morning so many years ago. We had never discussed it. Part
of me wanted to shove the memory aside, but to write this article and face
the facts of my life, I needed more details. Did I cry? Did she? Did we kiss
goodbye?
My mother told me I was excited about meeting a stewardess, about getting on
a plane. She also reminded me of the one piece of advice she gave me for
blending in: If anyone asked why I was coming to America, I should say I was
going to Disneyland.
Jose Antonio Vargas (J**[email protected]) is a former reporter for The
Washington Post and shared a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Virginia
Tech shootings. He founded Define American, which seeks to change the
conversation on immigration reform. Editor: Chris Suellentrop (C.Suellentrop
-*******[email protected]) | a****l
发帖数: 8211 | 2 great, as long as your intention is good, it is ok to break the law.
a
words
【在 S*********k 的大作中提到】
: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/magazine/my-life-as-an-undocu
: The author is also trying to get support at
: http://www.change.org/petitions/stand-with-me-jose-antonio-varg
: My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant
: By JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS
: Published: June 22, 2011
: One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a
: cab. She handed me a jacket. “Baka malamig doon” were among the few words
: she said. (“It might be cold there.”) When I arrived at the Philippines’
: Ninoy Aquino International Airport with her, my aunt and a family friend, I
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