Thread by @Noahpinion

1/The next book in my "immigration and diversity" reading series is "Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen", by Jose Antonio Vargas.

amazon.com/Dear-America-N…

2/This book is an autobiography, so it's not really about policy, history, or undocumented immigrants in general. Instead, it's just the story of one man's journey through the world as an undocumented immigrant.

3/Vargas was sent to the U.S. from the Philippines when he was very young. He grew up thinking he had a green card, not even realizing his undocumented status until a worker at the DMV told him.

4/From that moment until now, Vargas relied on a network of people to help him live a sort-of normal American life despite his undocumented status - his Filipino-American family, his American friends, etc.

5/This is the biggest revelation in the book - the realization that much of America is engaged in a sort of quiet, everyday routine of civil disobedience, helping their undocumented friends live quasi-normal American lives. A veritable Underground Railroad.

6/The book doesn't go much into the identities, stories, and motivations of the Underground Railroad of friends and family who sheltered and assisted Vargas (except to point out that many or most of them were white). But the mere fact of their existence is the core of the book.

7/Suppose you had a friend who was undocumented, who had grown up and lived essentially his entire life in the U.S., believing himself to be American.

Would you help that person get a job?

Would you help that person avoid deportation?

You probably would.

8/You probably would, first of all because of your basic human decency.

But also, because undocumented immigrants obviously ARE immigrants, and the story and idea of immigration resonates very strongly with most Americans.

9/Intellectually, most of us accept the idea that borders shouldn't be entirely open, and that immigration laws should be enforced.

In fact, Vargas does too. When Vargas is asked point-blank by Jeff Sessions whether he accepts this idea, he says yes!

10/But when we're faced with the personal, concrete reality of an undocumented immigrant who wants to be an American and make it in this country, the civic religion of America - the powerful idea of immigration as something to fight for - usually takes over.

11/Some people might laugh or sneer at the book's title. What does it mean to be an "undocumented citizen"?

But when you read the book, you realize that that's exactly what Vargas is. He is an American, with a deep attachment to this country and a deep sense of civic duty.

12/How can our government policy simultaneously uphold laws and borders, AND welcome people like Vargas whose undocumented citizenship represents an abrogation of those laws and borders?

This is a question we've never managed to fully answer, and Vargas doesn't answer it.

13/The answer must lie in some sort of humane compromise. Some recognition that the law, and the border, should be a flexible, compromising, ad-hoc, semi-permeable thing.

The DREAM Act was such a compromise. And the Republicans killed it.

14/DACA was another such compromise, a weak, kludgey substitute. And Republicans fought tooth and nail against DACA until Trump finally killed it.

15/As of right now there is *no* compromise on the table. Trump and the GOP are going to try their hardest to rid the nation of every single undocumented immigrant, while Democrats are basically just going to try to shield every undocumented immigrant they can, in retaliation.

16/Meanwhile, people like Vargas are caught in the middle of this struggle - demonized and persecuted by one side, used as a political prop by the other (Vargas complains about the latter in the book, so this is not just me making stuff up).

17/We had a chance to figure out what to do about undocumented immigration. In 1986, under Reagan, we actually took that chance. But by the 2010s, Republicans had become an intransigent, all-or-nothing party that would make no such compromises.

npr.org/templates/stor…

18/What will happen remains to be seen. But in the meantime, you should read Vargas' book, to better understand the human side of undocumented immigration - and undocumented citizenship.

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