Jose Antonio Vargas’s
article in the New York Times Magazine is a perfect,
heart-rending story of the difficulties faced by illegal immigrants
who strive to assimilate into the American dream — but it’s also a
tale of the potential dangers of a fissured immigration policy and
how forged documents have helped someone gain access to the White
House.*
Vargas begins with a story all too familiar to me, because it’s
what happened to my own father when he was 12, being sent away from
a poor mountain village to seek out better economic fortunes:
One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and
put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. “Baka malamig
doon” were among the few words she said. (“It might be cold
there.”) When I arrived at the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino
International Airport with her, my aunt and a family friend, I was
introduced to a man I’d never seen. They told me he was my uncle.
He held my hand as I boarded an airplane for the first time. It was
1993, and I was 12.
Eventually, Vargas arrives in the United States, assimilates,
and realizes that through no fault of his own, he is actually an
illegal immigrant. His family just wanted what every other family
wants for their kids, except they had to go through extraordinary
means to do it: Provide him with a better shot at having a good,
prosperous life.
Peppered throughout Vargas’s piece are instances in which a
person with less integrity, or even more vulnerability, could have
posed a real threat — most notably when he uses falsified records
to gain entry to, of all places, the White House:
I visited the White House, where I interviewed senior aides and
covered a state dinner - and gave the Secret Service the Social
Security number I obtained with false documents.
A state dinner. That means not just our own president,
but other world leaders were at this event, and that the Secret
Service ran his Social Security number and came up with no criminal
record.
A spokesman from the Secret Service explained to me on the phone
how the check doesn’t actually verify legal status but it does
check his specific criminal record associated with the Social
Security number he needed for work. But doesn’t that just mean that
someone would have had to jump through a few extra hoops (replete
with forged documents) to obtain his own Social Security number and
have an entirely new identity? (This would also mean that it’s not
just illegal immigrants that could do this, but either way, it’s a
security hole.)
And while it’s clear that Vargas posed no threat (he also passed
through a metal detector, was surrounded by security, and added
underwent records checks), even the Salahis’ innocuous incursion
into a state dinner bore some investigation. It may be worth
understanding how a person who uses falsified documents to obtain a
social security number gets cleared to access the White House.
Things like this seem less likely to happen with all the
heightened security in Washington and America at large — but
apparently they do. Restrictionists and open borders advocates
alike should look to this and realize just how much our laws do and
do not do to prevent people from doing certain things — Vargas
laments that his poor documentation prevented him from going to
Japan, Switzerland, or Mexico, but he sure as heck was able to
cover the campaign trail and a state dinner.
Is that what our immigration policy is set up to do? Prevent our
illegals from hitting the Swiss Alps?
The criminality of Vargas’s benign conduct — routinely using
forged documents — is ameliorated only because Vargas happens to
be an apparently benign person. It’s reminiscent of Frank Abagnale in
Catch Me If You Can — if Abagnale were a terrorist, it
would be an entirely different movie.
*Salacious lede. Stick with me.
