This is the kind of illegal alien story that enrages me. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: illegals have created this issue themselves. Rather than being humble, attempting to become part of America, asking politely to become a citizen, learning English, appealing to the generosity of Americans, and/or not blowing up our systems, they do exactly the opposite. They demand demand demand. They insult Americans. They demand we change our laws to conform to the illegals. They whine when the existing laws catch them up. They want us to cater to them in a myriad of ways. They fly their flags above ours. They yammer on about “The Race”. Many want parts of the Southwest returned to Mexico (which is funny, because Mexico didn’t want many of these people in the first place). Anyway, here we go, as Antonio Jose Vargas brings another whinefest
I came to Texas to document the crisis of undocumented immigrants. Now I’m stuck.
write this from the city of McAllen, which sits in the Rio Grande Valley near the border, just across from the Mexican city of Reynosa. In the last 24 hours I realize that, for an undocumented immigrant like me, getting out of a border town in Texas—by plane or by land—won’t be easy. It might, in fact, be impossible.
I flew into the valley Thursday morning to visit a shelter for unaccompanied Central American refugees and participate in a vigil in their honor. Outraged at the media coverage of this humanitarian crisis (these children are not “illegal,†as news organizations like CBS News and the New York Times call them), and frustrated by the political ping-pong centered on border security and increased enforcement, I also came here to share my own story of coming to the United States as an unaccompanied minor from the Philippines. I wanted to help change the narrative of the conversation and, with a camera crew, share stories from the shelter and its volunteers. The visit to the shelter was intense and sobering, watching small kids fight for their lives with nothing more than their spirits.
Yes, they are illegal. They have no right to be in this country. That’s another part that is enraging, illegals saying that other illegals are not “illegal”. Anyhow, what happened was that several other people wondered how he would get out of the checkpoint zone. Apparently Antonio forgot to do any research before going to agitate for America to change her laws to cater to illegals, so now he’s trapped there. Cry me a river.
I do not have a single U.S. government-issued ID. Like most of our country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, I do not have a driver’s license—not yet, at least. (Recently, California and Washington, D.C., passed laws granting licenses to their undocumented residents. Though New York City will start issuing municipal IDs to its undocumented population, the state of New York, where I currently live, does not issue driver’s licenses.) Identification aside, since outing myself in the New York Times Magazine in June 2011, and writing a cover story for TIME a year later, I’ve been the most privileged undocumented immigrant in the country. The visibility, frankly, has protected me. While hundreds of thousands of immigrants have been detained and deported in the past three years, I produced and directed a documentary film, “Documented,†which was shown in theaters and aired on CNN less than two weeks ago. I founded a media and culture campaign, Define American, to elevate how we talk about immigration and citizenship in a changing America. And I’ve been traveling non-stop for three years, visiting more than 40 states.
Of course, I can only travel within the United States and, for identification, when I fly I use a valid passport that was issued by my native country, the Philippines. But each flight is a gamble. My passport lacks a visa. If TSA agents discover this, they can contact CBP, which, in turn, can detain me. But so far, I haven’t had any problems, either because I look the way I do (“You’re not brown and you don’t look like a Jose Antonio Vargas,†an immigration advocate once told me), or talk the way I do—or because, as a security agent at John F. Kennedy International Airport who recognized me said without a hint of irony, “You seem so American.â€
He can complain all day long, the fact is he’s here illegally, as is Tania Chavez, “an undocumented youth leader from the Minority Affairs Council, one of the organizers of the vigil” for the illegal children streaming across the border. She’s soaked up lots of American tax money attending school, including higher education which garnered her two Masters, all, again, on the backs of the American and Texas taxpayers. She apparently can’t travel in more than a 45 mile radius, and if she visits Mexico, she might not be able to return.
Antonio’s movie asks that “Whatever your background or beliefs, our campaign is about asking how we define what it means to be American, and elevating how we engage as citizens.” Well, he’s not a citizen. He wants the US to conform to his illegality. He wants to change our culture. To conform to illegals. He goes on to write
A broken immigration system means broken families and broken lives. I did not realize how broken I was until I saw how broken Mama was.
But, he’s more worried about being able to come back to America than visiting his mother in the Philippines, because he might not be allowed back in.
Illegals voluntarily choose to create those “broken families and broken lives”. This is a problem of their own making.We didn’t ask them to separate from their families. They did it on their own. Actions have consequences.
They demand that legal American citizens change to accommodate the illegals. The illegals want to “shift the conversation around citizenship”. They can start by stopping the entitlement mentality and being all sorts of demandy. Post 9/11, when the security of the border and concerns over those who were overstaying their visas become a serious issue, illegals could been humble and conformed to America. They could have shown that they really wanted to be Americans, not citizen of another country who was legally entitled to be in America. Stop demanding we provide them with social services, healthcare, taxpayer money, housing, all sorts of things in their language. Instead, they did the opposite. America is a generous country. Illegals took heavy advantage of that generosity, and the resulting backlash is of their own making.
If Antonio is stuck on the border, tough. He can go back to his own country and apply for a visa. His opinion is that he has a right to be an American citizen simply because he is here.
Crossed at Right Wing News.
Read: Known Illegal Alien Goes To The Border, Whines About Being Stuck There »
