After twenty-five years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom.
Jose Antonio Vargas was already a well-known American journalist when he decided to “come out” as undocumented by revealing that he had been brought to America illegally as a child. He was instantly billed the “most famous illegal” in America and he became a political football even as he tried to simply make the point that the system is painfully broken and flawed. His story is interesting; he didn’t discover that his green card was a fake until he was sixteen and he tried to get a driver’s license (without his family knowing). His journey from that devastating afternoon to a position as a respected journalist still trying to compartmentalize his secret is fascinating. Vargas’ prose isn’t anything to write home about exactly, but it’s conversational and easy to read and the book is right about two hundred pages, so it goes by really fast. It’s obviously a book that is absolutely of the moment and it often feels really visceral, as in a brief section of the book where he’s pulled over by a police officer in Texas (of all places) while covering the 2008 Presidential Election and you can feel the fear and dread intensely. Later, when deconstructing the pernicious myth that the undocumented don’t “contribute,” he explores the backdoor that the government uses to allow the undocumented to pay taxes even as the government pretends to not know they’re even there in the first place and there’s a bitterness to his tone. When he tries to untangle all the contradictory, confusing and byzantine laws that surround immigration, he’s at first disbelieving and then disgusted. The book isn’t without flaws. I found parts of the book to be really choppy and the chronology often isn’t clear at all; he might be talking about the situation under President Trump and start telling a story about when he went to Texas for a story and then he’ll reveal that suddenly we’re back in Obama’s first term. It can be a little disorienting and the book could use a little help in that area. But on the whole, it’s a compelling book that seeks to bust myths about the undocumented, explore where those myths came from and, ultimately, humanize the undocumented and underline the ways they do contribute to America. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – absolutely of the moment, this engrossing book humanizes the undocumented among us and challenges us all to reevaluate the way we think and talk about issues of immigration. 3 ½ stars.