3 questions to ask yourself about US citizenship

(Full text of my TED Talk)

Four years after arriving in the United States, like a typical 16-year-old, I went to get my driver’s permit. After I showed the clerk my immigration papers — my green card — she told me it was fake. “Don’t come back here again,” she said. That’s how I found out I was in America illegally, and I am still here illegally.

I’m a journalist and a filmmaker — I live in stories, and I’ve learned that what most people don’t understand about immigration is what they don’t understand about themselves — their family’s old migration stories and the processes they had to go through before green cards and walls even existed — or what shaped their understanding of citizenship itself.

I was born in the Philippines. When I was 12, my mother sent me to live with her parents, my grandparents — Lolo and Lola as we call them in Tagalog. Lolo’s name was Teofilo. When he legally emigrated to America and became a naturalized citizen, he changed Teofilo to Ted — after Ted Danson, the actor from the TV show “Cheers.” It doesn’t get more American than that. Lolo’s favorite song was Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” and when it came to figuring how to get his only grandson — me — to America, he decided to do it his way. According to Lolo, there was no easy and simple way to get me here. So Lolo saved $4,500 — that’s a lot of money for a security guard who made no more than $8 an hour — to pay for a fake green card and a smuggler to bring me to the U.S.

So that’s how I got here. I can’t tell you how many times people tell me that their ancestors came to America “the right way.” To which I remind them America’s definition of “right way” has been changing ever since the first ship of settlers dropped anchor.

America, as we know it, is more than a piece of land, particularly because the land that now makes up the United States of America used to belong to other people and other countries.

America, as we know it, is also more than a nation of immigrants. Let me be clear: There are two groups of Americans who are not immigrants: Native Americans, who are indigenous to this land, and who were killed in acts of genocide, and African Americans, who were kidnapped, shipped, and enslaved to build this country.

And America, as we know it, is more than its systems of laws, particularly because there was a time when, even for U.S. citizens, segregation was legal, women couldn’t vote, two people of the same gender could not marry.

America is, above all, an idea — however unrealized and imperfect — one that only exists because the first settlers came here freely without worry of citizenship. America, as we know it, is not America without immigrants.

So, where did you come from?

How did you get here?

Who paid?

All across America, in front of diverse audiences — conservatives and progressives, high school students and senior citizens — I’ve asked those questions.

As a person of color, I always get asked where I’m from, as in: “Where are you from, from?” So I ask white people where they’re from, from, too.

After asking a student at the University of Georgia where he was from, he said: “I’m American.”

“I know,” I said. “But where are you from?”

“I’m white,” he replied.

“But white is not a country,” I said. “Where are your ancestors from?”

When he replied with a shrug, I said: “White is not a country. Where did you come from? How did you get here? Who paid?”

He couldn’t answer.

I don’t think you can talk about America as America without answering those three core questions.

Immigration is America’s lifeline, how this country has replenished itself for centuries, from the settlers and the revolutionaries who populated the original 13 colonies to the millions of immigrants, predominantly from Europe, who relentlessly colonized this land. Even though Native Americans were already here — and had their own tribal identities and ideas about citizenship — they were not considered U.S. citizens until the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act. Enslaved Africans did not choose to come here, were once counted as three-fifths of a person, and their struggle for full dignified citizenship continues to this moment — most recently in the multiracial and intergenerational reckoning behind the Black Lives Matter movement.

The landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act that Black Americans fought for inspired the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended America’s race-based exclusionary immigration system that had lasted for forty years. Of course, before that, there was the Chinese Exclusion Act and the General Immigration Act of 1882 — which, I should note, excluded the entry of immigrants who were considered “idiots and lunatics” from the United States. It would be easy to go on. But my point is this:

How much do any of us — whether immigrants of the past or the present — know of these crucial parts of American history? How much of this history makes up the actual U.S. citizenship test? Have you ever seen it? It’s a mostly oral test, and government officers ask applicants up to 10 of the 100 questions. To pass, applicants must get at least six answers right.

I looked at the test recently, and I was aghast at the questions posed, what constitutes acceptable answers, the glaring omissions. Though there’s a question about where the Statue of Liberty is, there’s no question about Ellis Island — about the United States as an immigrant nation and the countless anti-immigrant laws that were passed. There’s nothing about Native American history. There’s a question about what Martin Luther King, Jr. did, but, largely, there’s inadequate and irresponsible context about African Americans.

Here’s an example: Question # 74, under the American history section, asks applicants to “name one problem that led to the Civil War.”

All these three answers are accepted: “Slavery” or “States’ rights” or “Economic reasons.”

Did my Lola and Lolo get that question? If they did get the question, did they even understand the history behind it? How about my uncles and aunties and cousins and millions of other immigrants who had to take that test to become Americans? What about that student from University of Georgia — whose family had probably immigrated so long before the test was even a thing — does he get that question? What do immigrants know about America before they get here? What kind of citizenship are we applying for? And is that the same kind of citizenship we actually want to be a part of?

Come to think of it, what does dignified citizenship look like? How can I ask for it, when I just arrived here 26 years ago, when Black and Native people who have been in America for hundreds of years are still waiting for theirs?

One of my favorite writers is Toni Morrison. In 1996 — a year before I found out I was in the country illegally — my eighth grade class was assigned to read “The Bluest Eye,” Morrison’s first book. Instantly, the book challenged me to ask hard questions: Why does Pecola Breedlove, the young Black girl at the center of the book, want blue eyes? Who told her to want it? Why did she believe them? Morrison said she wrote the book to illustrate what happens when a person surrenders to what she called “the master narrative.” Definitions, Morrison taught me, belonged to the definers — not the defined.

Once I realized that I was here illegally, I convinced myself that if I was not a “legal” citizen by birth or law, another kind of citizenship was possible.

Citizenship as participation — I engage. I engage with all kinds of Americans, even Americans who don’t want me here.

Citizenship as contribution — I give back to my community in whatever ways I can. As an undocumented entrepreneur — yes, there is such a thing — I’ve employed many U.S. citizens.

Citizenship as education. We can’t wait for others to educate us about the past and how we got to this present. We have to educate ourselves and our circles.

Citizenship as something greater than myself.

We are, individually and collectively, rewriting the master narrative of America. The people who were once defined are now doing the defining. They’re asking the questions that need to be asked. A core part of that redefinition is how we define not only who is an American but what constitutes citizenship — which, to me, is our responsibility to one another. That responsibility is radical.

So consider your own personal narrative and ask yourself:

Where did you come from? How did you get here? Who paid?

BIO Vargas, the founder of Define American, is the author of the best-selling book DEAR AMERICA: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen.