Jose Antonio Vargas talks immigration in Trump era at Sonoma State University

Jose Antonio Vargas spent seven hours driving from Los Angeles to Rohnert Park to make sure he made a speaking engagement at Sonoma State University on Sunday.

Vargas, 35, doesn’t like driving. It makes him nervous.

But after President Donald Trump signed two executive orders Wednesday - calling for the “immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border” and the hiring of 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and 5,000 new Border Patrol officers - Vargas’ lawyers advised him flying is no longer a logical choice for him.

Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who grew up in Mountain View, is an undocumented immigrant, brought to the United States from the Philippines by his grandfather when he was 12.

The immigrant experience, especially the undocumented immigrant experience, was the point of his talk Sunday night at Sonoma State’s Green Music Center in front of an audience of about 150.

“I firmly believe, especially now, that we must insist on uncomfortable conversations, that we have to challenge ourselves to make sure that we’re thinking beyond our critical choir,” he said.

Vargas has lived and worked in America his entire adult life, fraudulently checking the “U.S. citizen” box on job applications. At the Washington Post, he won his Pulitzer for team coverage of breaking news. He later worked at the Huffington Post.

It was in the New York Times Magazine, in a June 2011 essay, that he publicly came out as undocumented, as a way to advocate for the passage of the DREAM Act, which did pass a year later as DACA, and now provides paths to citizenship for people who, like Vargas, were born abroad and brought to the United States as young children. But at 31, Vargas was one year too old to be eligible for its protections; it covered immigrants who were 30 and younger.

“By the way, it’s only a piece of paper, you can have it,” he said of his Pulitzer, which he readily acknowledges lends him a privilege most undocumented immigrants do not have. “I’d rather have a green card. I’d rather have a driver’s license that’s not marked, so I don’t freak out when I see a cop driving behind me.”

When he flies, he flies with a Philippine passport. When he drives, he drives with a “marked” driver’s license - valid only in California as a form of identification, granted under a 2015 law that allows undocumented immigrants to drive.

Vargas’ license is one of the more than 600,000 “marked” licenses issued so far. On the front, it says “federal limits apply.” On the reverse, it says “Not acceptable for official federal purposes.”

Since his essay, Vargas has founded Define American and #EmergingUS, two media organizations that look at immigration through a new lens.

“Our work is based on the belief that you cannot change the politics of immigration unless you change the culture in which people talk about immigration,” he said.

Sunday’s event, presented by My American DREAMs, a North Bay-based organization that advocates for DACA students and telling their stories, was just one stop on Vargas’ Bay Area tour.

He’s also planning a stop in Mountain View, where he’ll check in on his aging grandmother, and reassure her that her undocumented grandson will be just fine.

Reach Staff Writer Christi Warren at 707-521-5205 or christi.warren@pressdemocrat.com.