Top 33 Jose Antonio Vargas Quotes

I don’t think there’s any other issue out there that young people are more passionate, and more ahead in, than global warming.

People don’t really assume that I’m Filipino. Of course, they’re gonna think, ‘Oh, are you some sort of Hispanic?’ and you say, ‘No, I’m actually not.’ I get Korean or Chinese a lot.

As you watch ‘Documented’ on CNN, I ask you, my fellow Americans: What do you want to do with me? What do you want to do with us? How do you define American?

I did not realize how broken I was until I saw how broken Mama was.

Undocumented people get arrested all the time. I get arrested, and it’s front-page news. I feel guilt.

At the end of the day, stories connect us, not politics. And there’s so many stories out there waiting to be told. It’s just a matter of who’s out there listening.

Demographically speaking, young white people are not in the majority in this country; they’re in the minority. My question is, if they’re not the majority anymore, then what happens? How do things change? Or do they change at all?

In 2005, MTV Networks considered buying Facebook for seventy-five million dollars. Yahoo! and Microsoft soon offered much more. Zuckerberg turned them all down.

I think everybody could agree that our immigration system is broken. We have not told the truth about it.

I’ve always really wanted to make a film on what it means to be white in a country that’s getting less and less white.

While in high school, I worked part time at Subway, then at the front desk of the local YMCA, then at a tennis club, until I landed an unpaid internship at ‘The Mountain View Voice,’ my hometown newspaper.

I’m a gay, undocumented immigrant; I have to be optimistic.

When people saw that the film was called ‘White People,’ many got very defensive. I’ve been getting some very interesting emails – and I’m used to hate mail, believe me. I think this idea that we grouped white people together is offensive to people.

My mother made a choice. And when I was younger, I judged her for making that choice. Then I got older and got to be an adult, and I realized that was the ultimate sacrifice that any parent and any mother could possibly make.

When I was a kid, I resented my grandparents not speaking the perfect English I wanted to speak.

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

I worked for ‘The Chronicle’ in San Francisco, and immigration is a big issue in that region.

I think the hardest stories we tell are always the ones about ourselves. And as a journalist, I was taught that I’m never supposed to put myself in the story. So I spent what, 11, 12 years of my life writing about other people so I don’t have to face my own life.

I think everyone deserves dignity.

On the surface, I’ve created a good life. I’ve lived the American dream. But I am still an undocumented immigrant.

I’ve been uncomfortable dealing with my identity since I was 16 years old.

I believe fundamentally in the kindness of the American people because I have been a beneficiary of it.

Of all the questions I get asked as an undocumented immigrant in the United States, there are two – asked in various permutations via email, social media or in person – that chill me to the bone: ‘Why don’t you just make yourself legal?’ And: ‘Why don’t you get in the back of the line?’

When you’re undocumented, you’re supposed to keep your head down and be quiet and pay taxes, social security – even though people don’t know that we do those things – and not say anything.

I am undoubtedly one of the more, if not the most, privileged undocumented immigrants in America. And for us at Define American, which is this culture campaign group that I founded with some friends, culture trumps politics.

I am more than an immigration activist.

For decades, I have cringed whenever someone called me ‘illegal,’ as if I’m an insect on someone’s back. I found out I didn’t have the right papers – that I was here illegally – when I tried to get a driver’s permit at age 16. But I am not ‘illegal.’ No person is.

I’m not a minority: I’m a majority of one. We all are. To call someone a minority, you give them baggage, of not being full, or not being seen as full. All of us need to be seen as full human beings.

To me, politics is culture. I became a journalist, and later a filmmaker, to get to know my new country and my volatile place in it as a gay, undocumented Filipino-American.

I have no control whatsoever on how people perceive me from the Right or the Left. All I have control over is who I say I am.

When it comes to fighting for citizenship that many people take for granted, there isn’t anyone I would not talk to. When it comes to immigration, there isn’t any question I will not answer.

In Tagalog, we call undocumented people ‘TNT,’ which means tago ng tago, which means ‘hiding and hiding.’ So that’s literally what undocumented means in Tagalog. And that kind of tells you how Filipinos think of this issue, and really any culture, right?

When I’m writing, I can always play around with tense. I can always make past present. I can always kind of manipulate, and I can always be delusional in a way that’s completely self-serving. With film, it’s like, the camera can’t really lie. It can manipulate to a certain extent.