Jose Antonio Vargas
The Los Angeles Times reported that Jose Antonio Vargas, the Filipino Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and activist who in 2011 revealed that he unknowingly entered the United States with false documents as a child, will publish his debut memoir with HarperCollins imprint Dey Street Books.
The publication date for “Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen” has not yet been announced.
Vargas moved to the United States at age 12 in 1993, to live with his American grandparents, and initially, he was unaware that he was living in the country illegally.
He disclosed his immigration status in 2011, writing in an essay for the New York Times Magazine.
Vargas is the founder of Define American, a nonprofit immigration advocacy group that supported the so-called Dream Act, a bill that would grant permanent residency to some immigrants who came to the United States as children.
Jose Vargas as I see it is an opportunist of the worst kind. He tries to portray himself as a poor underprivileged immigrant who was abused by the “system” but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I concede that his mother sent him to America from the Philippines as a child but he is in no way similar to those illegal immigrants from Mexico or Central America. Furthermore, he attended and graduated from an Ivey league University in California and became a successful staff writer for the Washington Post. In later years Mr. Vargas notified his employer of his illegal status. At this point, he thought he would be fired from his position but instead, they volunteered to sponsor him for a “green card”. However, this generous offer fell outside of Vargas’s plans and agenda. He decided to take another road and paint himself as part of a group of immigrants who were bullied by the US Government and thus can bring himself as a rising star along with free publicity.
Consequently, Jose Vargas has been on the front cover of Time magazine depicted in the center among several Hispanic Immigrants and being the only Asian face in the group.
Since then he’s been a guest on several talk shows, Universities and even part of an HBO Special on his life story. Yes folks, today Jose Vargas is a poor underprivileged immigrant laughing all the way to the bank.
To each their own I guess, but
this radical cynicism and very pessimistic perpective are one the very reason why Millions of people suffer because they are misunderstood, labelled and prevented from being granted even the most basic human neccessities. Yes, it is true Jose Antonio Vargas is no different than any other so-called ‘illegal immigrant’ from what ever country you are refering to but, the only difference between him and the other illegal immigrants that you keep on defining over as a whiney opportunist ‘uderprivileged immigrants’, stood his ground, did not let these circumstances beat him down. And if pursuing your dreams, obtaining education, getting access to health benefits, fighting for your rights for being HUMAN is a crime then that’s a big HYPOCRISY coming for you. If you were in his shoes, I don’t think you’d be saying those kinds of things. I would like to see you do better things than him, than whine on comment boxes and judge people. You are just basically preventing the possibility of people with these circumstances from contributing to the betterment of the world.I know I may sound very liberalist-like, know-it-all, and illogical even, but I would just want to really disagree with what you are saying.
I really don’t want to debate this issue with you. You seem to be very liberal and biased thus cannot recognize the theme of my column. The point I was trying to make was; Mr. Vargas is far from underprivileged and if you can’t see that than you are blind. He was afforded many opportunities as I mentioned in my comments but you chose to not address it because it wasn’t part of you agenda. We as Americans have to be cognizant that there are laws that must be obeyed as a civilized nation. Many Immigrants feel they can barge into our country and set-up shop. That is clearly what our president is attempting to change. We definitely don’t want lawless immigrants invading withing borders. As with Jose Vargas, he is in a different class and had many advantages up until now. He actually declined sponsorship from his former employer at the Washington Post. So to place himself with the other undocumented Immigrant population just defines himself as a career opportunist.