Jose Antonio Vargas has been in the U.S. illegally for 25 years. Now, he's going in depth on the hiding, the isolation — and his hope for a citizenship evolution.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00What is a citizen? Like, what does that really mean?
00:03Does it mean that if you're a U.S. citizen, you're guaranteed equal protection under the law?
00:07Talk to black people about that. Talk to Puerto Ricans about that.
00:23I've lived here illegally for the past 25 years with no path to citizenship or legalization.
00:28There's no line for me to get in the back of,
00:31which is I would be more than happy to do if there was such a line.
00:34I can't talk to you about immigrant rights without talking about Black Lives Matter,
00:38without talking about income inequality, without talking about the MeToo movement,
00:42without talking about LGBTQ rights.
00:43Now in this era of wokeness and resistance, you know, for people like us,
00:48it's not some era, it's our lives.
00:59I spent like 14 years of my life hiding from the government,
01:02but I didn't realize that the emotional cost of that hiding has actually been the fact that
01:06I had been hiding from people who were close to me.
01:09Like, I took the isolation so deeply that I never told anybody.
01:29What does it mean to be separated from your family for 25 years?
01:33You know, I have a sister in the Philippines who, I was there when she was born.
01:37She was a year and a half when I left. She's 27 now.
01:40I have a brother in the Philippines who I never met.
01:42I didn't know why was I here legally?
01:44Why couldn't my grandparents bring me here legally?
01:47My grandfather was like, we'll get you here,
01:50you'll work under the table as a janitor, maybe,
01:53and then you'll find a woman who's a human being.
01:56My mom loves to, she likes to FaceTime.
02:00I actually don't like doing it because it feels like some sort of twisted joke.
02:07This technology that was manufactured in China,
02:10delivered to Cupertino, ended up in Fifth Street, Fifth Avenue here in New York,
02:13and now I'm here.
02:14I don't know how to do it.
02:16I don't know how to do it.
02:17I don't know how to do it.
02:18I don't know how to do it.
02:19I don't know how to do it.
02:20I don't know how to do it.
02:22delivered to Cupertino, ended up in Fifth Street, Fifth Avenue here in New York,
02:25where I bought what I bought mine.
02:27This iPhone can travel to more places than my mother and I can.
02:30We in this country have been so used to calling people like me as criminals
02:35and aliens and illegals that we are totally fine as a country
02:39locking and caging young people up.
02:43It got us to the point where we actually don't think those children are children,
02:46that we lock them up.
02:51It's not like whenever you see an article on immigration in the New York Times,
02:55there's a paragraph that says,
02:56however, undocumented immigrants contribute billions of dollars to social security
03:01and billions of dollars to federal and local and state taxes.
03:03I believe that individually and collectively,
03:06we are creating a language of what a fair, inclusive America
03:14should look like and ought to look like.
03:16How do you do that?
03:17America should look like and ought to look like.
03:20How do we make sure that we actually use our identities to connect to each other
03:25and not build walls?