The Impending Deportation of Jose Antonio Vargas

This is the funniest thing you will read this weekend:

“On election night, while making my way through a crowd gathered outside the Fox News headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, a white man wearing a Mets cap patted my back and said through the noise: “Get ready to be deported.” Rattled, I made it inside the green room and waited to go on the air. …

“What does it feel like to be the country’s most famous illegal?” the Fox anchor Lou Dobbs once asked me. We were off the air at the time, luckily, so I didn’t have to answer on live television. In general, it feels daunting. Since Mr. Trump was elected president of the United States, it has felt terrifying. …

The pain and vulnerability underlying these conversations are a direct contrast to the vulgarity of the public messages I get on social media, particularly on Twitter. “Christmas came early this year. It will be even earlier next year when @joseiswriting becomes Deportee # 1,” reads one message. “I can’t wait until @joseiswriting gets deported. It’ll be such a great day,” reads another. …”

The alt-right has waited for years to settle this score.

It started in 2011 when Jose Antonio Vargas became the #LyingPress poster child for the DREAM Act amnesty in The New York Times Magazine and later in 2012 in that Time magazine cover story. Jose’s activism progressed from there to his Emerging US and Define American projects. It has continued in hundreds of articles about illegal immigration like this one in Rolling Stone on United States v. Texas.

The exact moment when Jose crossed the line though was his MTV documentary “White People” which came out last summer around the beginning of Trump’s presidential campaign. It was one thing for an illegal alien to become a public champion of illegal aliens in the United States. It was another thing for an illegal alien to arrogantly lecture White people whose ancestors built this country about checking their “White privilege.”

Adiós, Jose!