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- Jose Antonio Vargas produced and directed the CNN Film "Documented"
- Vargas announced his status as an undocumented immigrant in June 2011
- He writes that making the film 'is an act of civil disobedience' to humanize a 'politicized issue'
- Vargas earned a Pulitzer Prize for Washington Post's coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre
(CNN) -- "What do you want to do with me?"
What do you want to do with us?
How do you define American?"
On behalf of 11 million undocumented immigrants like me -- many of us Americans in all but papers -- I asked those questions to the Senate Judiciary Committee in February 2013, nearly two years after I publicly outed myself as an undocumented immigrant in The New York Times Magazine.
Against the advice of lawyers, I wrote, in detail, what I had to do to live and survive in America: hide in plain sight as I worked as a journalist for more than a decade; lie on government forms to get jobs while paying taxes and contributing to Social Security (undocumented workers provide billions in both); grow estranged from my mother in the Philippines who put me on a plane to the United States in 1993. In outing myself, I risked everything and prepared myself for anything.
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What I was not prepared for, however, was silence, especially from politicians in Washington, where immigration has become the third rail of American politics, often framed in partisan, polarizing terms, mostly subjected to elections, and tied to the future of political parties.
Consider this state of affairs: Congressional leaders, particularly House Republicans, hesitate to pass substantive reform because they don't trust the Obama administration to enforce immigration laws.
The Obama administration, meanwhile, has been busy enforcing the laws by deporting nearly 2 million immigrants in five years -- that's a record, and an unjustifiable part of President Barack Obama's legacy. And in the backdrop of this finger-pointing, political standstill is an urgent moral crisis among millions of families in America.
To us who are directly affected by the political standstill, immigration is urgent and personal. Immigration is about our families.
'I didn't know I was undocumented'
The film "Documented," a project of the nonprofit and nonpartisan Define American campaign, is about my families: the family I was blessed to be born into, and the family of friends, mentors and allies that I found when I moved to the United States at 12, a Filipino kid trying to make sense of my new home in America.
As an undocumented gay teenager in the 1990s, I had to believe that whenever I heard people use the terms "illegal" and "faggot," they were not talking about me. As I graduated from public schools and started working in newsrooms, I told myself that I am only the "illegal" that my own country has not bothered to get to know.
Watch 'Documented'Explore the journey out of the shadows led by undocumented immigrant and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas. CNN Films' "