Quote

I remember the first thing I did when I found out I was illegal was to get rid of my thick Filipino accent. I figured that I had to talk white and talk black at the same time, like Charlie Rose and Dr. Dre. If I can talk white and black then no one is ever going to think that I'm illegal.

Jose Antonio Vargas

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Jose Antonio Vargas
Age: 43
Born: 1981
Born: February 3
Journalist
Antipolo
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Firsts
Illegal
First
Rose
Thing
Talk
Filipino
Going
White
Accent
Time
Black
Charlie
Think
Found
Accents
Thinking
Remember
Figured
Like
Ever
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More quotes by Jose Antonio Vargas

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I've done everything I've done in America with the limitations I have.
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There isn't anybody I won't talk to about immigration - at least once.
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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.
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As you can imagine, there were people who were like, Why are you being the PC cop? or, This is Orwellian to tell people to stop using the word 'illegal' to refer to people. Well, I just want people to think it through.
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I think I've always been paranoid.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The DREAMers are the safe ones, right? It's okay to advocate for the DREAMers because they're the English-speaking, college-educated ones, right? It's so interesting that I set out to document DREAMers, but what I ended up doing was actually documenting the experience of, the reality and truth of, the moms and the parents.
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To me, it's just that social media is allowing people to be in charge of their own narratives.
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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...?
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We're talking about America - a country that's been built on the back of cheap labor. That's addicted to cheap labor. Talk to the Chinese and Irish who built the railroads. Talk to the black people who built the South. So what is the US-Mexico conversation really about?
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Independent of politics, the changing narrative on immigration is directly correlated to the fact that we have new technologies that are allowing people to talk to each other and tell their own stories and organize themselves.
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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.
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To this day writing is the most painful thing to do.
Jose Antonio Vargas
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I am not the 'illegal' you think I am, and immigration is not what you think it is.
Jose Antonio Vargas
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The only reason I became a writer was so I could exist on a piece of paper.
Jose Antonio Vargas
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One of the things I had to really wrap my head around is I have no control over what people call me: advocate, activist, gay, Filipino, undocumented person, gay person with an Asian face and Latino name.
Jose Antonio Vargas