On NPR's Fresh Air today, Terry Gross interviewed Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer winning journalist who wrote about his undocumented immigrant status in the New York Times magazine. There is so much fodder in this interview, and even more in the one that followed his, for excellent discussion material.
For the moment, let me pick on just one part of this conversation. Terry Gross asks about half way through the interview, "I think a lot of people have been basically making this comment that you were working as a journalist, which is about uncovering the truth, yet you were telling fundamental lies about yourself. So was journalism therefore the wrong profession for you? Were you betraying your profession by not being honest about yourself?"
My problem here is that Jose Antonio Vargas WAS being honest about himself; "illegal" status as an immigrant is not a part of the immigrant. Jose Antonio Vargas is gay, and he is Filipino and American, and he is a talented writer, but in no way is illegal a part of him. The experience of being labeled illegal is very much a part of him and his life experience, but it he is not an "illegal person".
My husband is a father, a Mexican, a hard-worker and entrepreneur, and the most committed partner a person could ever ask for, and he was in the US illegally for four years, but he has never been or will ever be an "illegal person".
I listened to that interview and thought it was great. My own father lived in that limbo for 15 years before becoming a citizen. Life without papers was scary and stressful.
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