Jose Antonio Vargas Quotes

America is White and Black and Latino and Asian. America is mixed. America is immigrants.

Citizenship to me is more than a piece of paper. Citizenship is also about character. I am an American. We're just waiting for our country to recognize it.

For Filipino Americans, it's a battle for recognition, for identity in a culture where, for the mainstream, Asians tend to fade into a monochromatic racialized 'other.'

I am not the 'illegal' you think I am, and immigration is not what you think it is.

When people call me illegal, calling me illegal says more about you than it does about me.

To be in America illegally is actually a civil offense and not a criminal one.

You have to stand for something bigger than yourself.

I have no control over what people call me. The only thing I have control over is my work, and that's really all I can be judged on.

To me, it's just that social media is allowing people to be in charge of their own narratives.

I grew up in newsrooms. I've been in newsrooms since I was 17 years old. Journalism has been like my church; it's been like my identity.

A friend said to me I'm like a walking New Yorker article. It's true! That's how I write. That's how I think.

I always felt like I had the word "illegal" tattooed on my forehead.

I'm not a politician. I'm not a policy wonk. I was a political reporter, but that's not really what turns me on. What turns me on is how people perceive the issue and how people see people like me.

The only reason I became a writer was so I could exist on a piece of paper.

There isn't anybody I won't talk to about immigration - at least once.

I like Q&A's better than articles sometimes because I feel like I'd rather hear somebody actually talk or wrestle with.

To this day writing is the most painful thing to do.

Film, as any immigrant will tell you, television and movies is the way we make sense of America when we first got here.

I think I've always been paranoid.

I've done everything I've done in America with the limitations I have.

The last thing reporters and editors want to be told is what to do and how to write. They don't want to be some politically correct, Orwellian, kind of like "you're telling me how to write about...?"

I got here when I was 12, I found out I was undocumented when I was 16, I became a journalist when I was 17, and all I ever did was write other stories to run away from myself.

No amount of success - whatever that means, quote-unquote success - no amount of success replaces the reality of being separated from my family for this long.

The greatest gift that we have as human beings is our ability to empathize. That's why I think personal stories matter so much. That's someone's mom. That's someone's daughter. That's someone's son.

A broken immigration system means broken families means broken lives. That's what is at stake.

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.

Culture is about humanizing people. You look at the African-American civil rights movement, you look at the LGBT rights movement - the culture changed before the politics did.

I guess, as a reporter, I always thought that my biggest strength was that I could get anybody to talk to me. I wasn't the best writer, but I could get people to talk to me.