Thread: Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Jose Vargas an illegal alien

Journalist Jose Vargas Says He's An Undocumented Immigrant, Will Fight For Dream Act

Ryan J. Reilly | June 22, 2011, 10:50AM

Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Jose Antonio Vargas revealed Wednesday that he is an undocumented immigrant who discovered his status when he visited the DMV when he was 16. He says he'll lobby for the Dream Act, a bill that would give young people who were educated in this country a path to legal permanent residency.

Vargas revealed his status in a piece he wrote for the New York Times and in an interview with ABC News.

He first came to the United States from the Philippines in 1993 when he was 12. Vargas was able to obtain a license from Oregon using the address of the father of a friend, and that license didn't expire until earlier this year. In the meantime he launched a career in journalism, working at the Washington Post, the Huffington Post and profiling Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg for the New Yorker.

Writes Vargas:

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.

He said he tried to avoid writing about immigration for the newspaper:

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 thechairman 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.

Vargas said he continued to worry about people finding out about his immigration status. While he obtained a driver's license in the state of Washington that could carry him through until 2016, he wrote it would be tough to go through "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," he wrote. "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 bossesÂ* and employers and apologized for misleading them -- a mix of humiliation and liberation coming with each disclosure."

Vargas has also launched the "Define American" campaign to start a "real conversation about immigration in our country." He says he'll push for support of the Dream Act, which has failed to reach the 60 vote threshold required to overcome a filibuster in the Senate. The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold another hearing on the bill on Tuesday, but there hasn't been any indication that the bill could overcome opposition from Senate Republicans.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com

He needs to be arrested and deported
and every company that has ever hired him needs to be fined for doing so.

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

He needs to be arrested and deported
and every company that has ever hired him needs to be fined for doing so.

I agree 110% with this. Arrest and deport him and fine all the companies he has worked for...
Anything less just invites millions of other illegals here.

Just one more illegal doing a job an American won't do.

Are you sick of hearing that yet?

He is the perfect one to deport. High profile and it will send a message NO ONE will be immune from deportation if your here illegally.

There's a video at the link:

Journalist Jose Antonio Vargas Comes Out as an Illegal Immigrant

Adam Martin 1 hr 47 mins ago

.The Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jose Antonio Vargas came out as an undocumented immigrant in a New York Times Magazine article today. The lengthy piece details his secret life, which he lived while excelling as a journalist and, outwardly, a U.S. citizen. He learned when he was 16 that his family had used fake documentation to get him to the U.S., and over the years, he kept up the illusion. But he says it was four students' pilgrimage from Miami to Washington, D.C., to lobby for the Dream Act that inspired him to go public with his own immigration status.


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.

Vargas, who won a breaking news Pulitzer in 2007 for his coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings, has had a big year for opening up. In September, he wrote that he was gay in his New Yorker profile of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. A similar candidness pervades his Times Magazine piece today, when he talks about his internal strife during the immigration debates of the 1990s. "They’re not talking about me, I would tell myself. I have something to contribute." the whole article is worth a read when you have time, but for a quick glimpse of some of the emotions running through it, check out the ABC interview with Vargas on his revelation:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/atlantic/201106 ... grant39120

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

He needs to be arrested and deported
and every company that has ever hired him needs to be fined for doing so.

He really should. However, the delusional criminals known as DREAMies seem to think that their criminal counterpart is awesome. Just one more reason that without exception, we need to deport all of the criminal illegal alien losers in this country:

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He managed to get all of that with fake documentations and not get caught? Thats (mod edit)awesome..

dreamact.info/forum/showthread.php?t=22393&page=2

Originally Posted by laughinglynx

Just one more illegal doing a job an American won't do.

Are you sick of hearing that yet?

YEP!

I'd feel a little twinge of sympathy if he was at least "in the system" trying to get legal. But he has done NOTHING because he hasn't had to.

We don't need any more journalists (mod edit)...

Deport him.

He'll be featured on ABC news today and tomorrow according to this article:

Journalist Jose Antonio Vargas Comes Out as Illegal Immigrant to Fight for DREAM Act
By DAN HARRIS (@danbharris) and JAKE WHITMAN
June 22, 2011
For the past decade, Jose Antonio Vargas has pursued success in journalism. In addition to winning a Pulitzer Prize with the Washington Post for his coverage of the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, he has also covering a variety of topics including presidential politics, and even scored an exclusive interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Throughout all of his early success, however, Vargas harbored a huge secret: he was living and working in the United States illegally.

"I wasn't supposed to be there. I wasn't supposed to be walking with Mark Zuckerberg. I wasn't supposed to be interviewing Romney's sons. Why was I doing it? Because I wanted to survive. I wanted to live. I wanted to earn what it means to be an American," Vargas told ABC News.

One morning when he was a 12-year-old boy living in the Philippines, Vargas says his mother took him to the airport -- and sent him to America. He arrived in Mountain View, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley, where he lived with his grandparents, and soon became a standout student at the local high school.

He says he spent the next four years in the dark about his citizenship status, only realizing the truth when he rode his bike to the Department of Motor Vehicles, where like his friends he wanted to apply for a driver's permit. But Vargas says the DMV told him that his green card was a fake, and warned him not to return.

After peddling home, Vargas confronted his grandfather, who finally told him the truth: he was in the U.S. illegally. It was the first moment of what would become an elaborate -- and all-too-common -- life of secrets, lies and ever-present fear.

"I remember the very first instinct was, okay, that's it, get rid of the accent... 'Because I just thought to myself, you know, I couldn't give anybody any reason to ever doubt that I'm an American," Vargas said.

Watch ABC's Dan Harris' interview with Jose Vargas this Thursday on "World News with Diane Sawyer" and "Nightline" and Friday on "Good Morning America"

After furiously studying American movies to shed his accent, he eventually discovered journalism. One motivating factor for Vargas was that if his name appeared at the top of articles, he felt it was less likely that anyone would question his immigration status.

He says he was able to land his early reporting gigs by using a doctored Social Security card his grandfather had obtained for him. But in his early 20s he got a job offer from the Washington Post -- and they told him they needed to see a driver's license.

Vargas managed to obtain one in the state of Oregon, where the laws are more relaxed, by faking documents. He received help in this process by Rich Fischer and Pat Hyland, two high-ranking public school officials in his town, with whom he had become very close during high school.

"You have to do what you have to do," Vargas said. "I wanted to work. I wanted to prove that I was worthy of being here … and I was gonna do whatever it took to prove that."

Vargas was able to obtain the license, and his career quickly took off -- with no one knowing his citizenship status. At one point he was even able to get into the White House using his fake license to cover a state dinner.

"I was nervous," Vargas said of that night. "I keep thinking every time I've done these things -- was somebody gonna catch me?"


The DREAM Act : Hope for Thousands
Yet after all of these years, Vargas is now outing himself as one of the millions in the United States who are living in the country illegally. He is aware of the danger he is putting himself in, and that he could be sent back to the Philippines.

Vargas says that he made up his mind last December when Congress failed to pass the DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act, a bill that would allow illegal immigrants who came to this country as children to become citizens, if they go to college or serve in the military.

To shine a light on a massive problem, Vargas will be starting an online campaign at defineamerican.com to push for passage of the DREAM Act, which is currently stalled in Congress.

The critics of the DREAM Act say that it will reward undocumented parents, and that it would be an open invitation to fraud, giving an incentive to parents in other countries to come to the U.S. illegally with their children.


"Are we seriously going to deport 11 million people?" Vargas asks. "That's the estimated number of undocumented people in this country. We're not seriously going to do that. We have not had a really serious conversation about this issue.

"We are a part of this society. And I think everyone deserves dignity," he added.

Former Mountain View High principal Pat Hyland, who along with Rich Fisher, the former superintendent of the Mountain View Los-Altos Union school district, helped Vargas in his initial steps towards his career, says that she'd do it all over again to help him reach his potential. Fisher says that fear can't stop kids.

"If you worked with kids that you knew were undocumented and watched them just fade away as they began to approach adulthood, out of fear that they weren't gonna be-- that they'd be found out … The right thing to do is to try to help young people to meet their potential," Fisher told ABC News.

Vargas has certainly reached great heights as a highly ambitious and successful reporter. His goal now is to change a law while changing the outlook of thousands of children whose dream is to become citizens.

"You can call me whatever you want to call me, but I am an American," Vargas said. "No one can take that away from me. No, no one can.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/immigrat ... d=13899697

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Pulitzer Prize winner reveals he's an illegal immigrant

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