I was about to throw away the career that I’d risked everything for. No one was forcing me to do it. I was forcing myself to do it.
On 22 June 2011, the New York Times Magazine published my essay: My Life As An Undocumented Immigrant. The essay’s other headline: OUTLAW.
A couple of days before my 4,300-word confessional was published, I was at the Times building in Manhattan going over the printed proofs of the essay, double-checking every fact, rereading every sentence. Since I’ve lied about so many facts about my life so I could pass as an American citizen, the last thing I needed was any kind of correction. The essay had to be airtight, unimpeachable.
My phone rang. It was one of the immigration lawyers who had been advising me. As a courtesy, I had sent a copy of the essay to the lawyers.
“Jose, are you going to print that you’ve done things that are ‘unlawful’? In the New York Times?”
“Yes. It’s in the essay.”
“Jose, the moment you publish that, we cannot help you.”
Telling the truth – admitting that I had lied on government forms to get jobs – meant that “getting legal” would be nearly impossible.
“Jose, are you there?”
I took a big breath.
“If I can’t admit that,” I said, “then why am I doing this?”
For the record, I never lied in any of my stories. I never fabricated a single fact or contextual detail or made up a source, lies that ended the careers of other journalists I’d heard and read about, from Janet Cooke to Stephen Glass to Jayson Blair. Still, I lied about who I am, specifically my legal status. To get jobs, I had lied to employers, from the Chronicle to the HuffPost, about my citizenship status.
The essay was meant to right that wrong, to trace the origins of those lies, an attempt at getting at the “how” and “why”. Why did I have to lie? How does someone become “illegal”? How do undocumented workers who have no legal papers pay income taxes?
Actually, the government has no problem taking our money; it just won’t recognize that we have the right to earn it. Regardless of immigration status, all wage earners are required to pay federal taxes. Using my doctored social security number (SSN), which is not valid for employment, I’ve paid income taxes since I started regularly working at 18. Many undocumented workers who don’t have SSNs use an ITIN – Individual Taxpayer Identification number, a tax processing number issued by the IRS.
Nationwide, the amount of taxes that the Internal Revenue Service collects from undocumented workers ranges from almost $2.2m in Montana, which has an estimated undocumented population of 4,000, to more than $3.1bn in California, which is home to more than 3 million undocumented immigrants. According to the non-partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants nationwide pay an estimated 8% of their incomes in state and local taxes on average. To put that in perspective, the top 1% of taxpayers pay an average nationwide effective tax rate of just 5.4%.
Another question I’m often asked: how do undocumented workers contribute to social security?
I’ll never forget the day I received a letter from the Social Security Administration (SSA) outlining my “earnings record”. The letter said that I’d paid $28,838 to social security and that my employer also paid $28,838. I didn’t keep track of it. All I knew was, whenever I got a paycheck, they took out money for social security and Medicare. I never bothered wondering what that meant, given that I knew I had no access to the funds. Crazy as it sounds, since I wasn’t even supposed to be working in the first place, I figured paying into the system and not benefiting from it was some kind of penance. Perhaps a whole lot of workers are doing a whole of penance. According to the SSA itself, unauthorized workers have paid $100bn into the fund over the past decade.
The reality behind these numbers – the stories they tell about how undocumented people fit in the fabric of our society – are not reflected in the way the news media frames illegal immigration.
A longtime journalist who edited immigration for a regional news outlet told me: “Even when we report facts about undocumented immigrants, the readers either don’t care or don’t want to believe it. That’s how successful the rightwing sites have been.”
To an undocumented immigrant who happens to be a journalist, journalists’ often uninformed coverage of immigration is especially galling. With some notable exceptions, the mainstream media’s coverage of immigration is lackluster at best and irresponsible at worst, promoting and sustaining stereotypes while spreading misinformation. Television is the worst culprit. Most journalists and media influencers I’ve spoken to or have been interviewed by do not know basic information about immigration and how the system works – or doesn’t.
In February 2017, a month after President Trump took office, I agreed to go on Erin Burnett’s eponymous show on CNN. The subject was Trump’s plan to “secure the border”. Before we went on air, Erin turned to me and asked: “So, you’re still undocumented, right?” I was flabbergasted. Did she think being undocumented is like some light that I can easily turn on or off?
I’ve been a guest on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher twice. There is a small reception for the guests after the live taping, and Maher usually shows up for a few minutes to mingle. At the reception after my second appearance, in April 2017, Maher told me he was confused. “I just don’t understand,” he said, “why you just can’t fix this thing.” As if “this thing” is a chipped tooth or a dent in a Tesla.
If Maher, of all people, doesn’t understand how even someone high profile like me can’t just “fix this thing”, then it shouldn’t be a surprise that most people, regardless of political affiliation, have no idea how the immigration system works.
When I found out that Chuck Todd, the host of NBC’s Meet the Press, was scheduled to do a one-on-one interview with Donald Trump as he secured the Republican presidential nomination in May 2016, I emailed Todd and asked that we speak on the phone. On the call, I told him that Asians, not Latinos, are the fastest-growing undocumented population in the country and urged him to ask Trump how building a wall on the southern border would protect Americans from undocumented Asians who flew here and overstayed their visas.
“That’s a good point,” he said before we hung up. I also emailed him an article from the Atlantic: Asians Now Outpace Mexicans in Terms of Undocumented Growth – Chinese, South Koreans, and Indians Among the Fastest-Growing Segments of Undocumented Immigrants, the headline read. Todd never did ask my question, perhaps because it did not fit the narrative. Maybe he just ran out of time.
Collectively, the news media is running out of time in chronicling a demographic makeover unlike anything this country has ever seen. The estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants don’t live on an island unto ourselves. At least 43 million immigrants, documented and undocumented, reside in these United States. You cannot separate the documented from the undocumented population, because many undocumented people, myself included, have family members who are US citizens or permanent legal residents. At least nine million people, in fact, are part of what are called “mixed-status” families – households in which one member or more is here legally and the others are not. We’re all mixed up.
Some of our politicians are all too eager to exploit that kind of ambiguity. If President Trump could spark his political career by questioning the citizenship of a sitting American president, who happened to be the country’s first African American commander-in-chief, then of course he would question anyone’s citizenship. When it comes to immigration and the question of who is welcome here, Trump is the culmination of a festering bipartisan mess and a numbingly complicit public.
Even the supposedly egalitarian title of “citizen” seems to contain subtle distinctions in worth. A few weeks after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, a young man from San Juan emailed me. “Hey Jose,” he wrote, “I know you’re not a US citizen but are you sure you want to be one? I’m a citizen and it don’t guarantee everything, man.”
Jose Antonio Vargas is the author Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen