WASHINGTON -- A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covered presidential politics and the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings for The Washington Post is going on network television to announce he is an illegal immigrant. "I'm done running. I'm exhausted," Vargas wrote. "I don't want that life anymore." Vargas shared a Pulitzer Prize for the Post's coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings. A 2006 series he wrote on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Washington inspired a documentary film. Last year, he wrote a profile of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for The New Yorker. Most recently, he was a senior contributing editor at Huffington Post. He said he left after less than a year and was worried professionally about a looming deadline: the expiration of his 8-year-old Oregon driver's license.
I always bought into the whole “illegal immigrants are taking jobs that American’s don’t want” until just now. Never thought it affected me, didn’t think I’d become a victim of illegal immigration.
Man, was I wrong. I’ve been sitting around the last few months wondering why the top news outlets, or at least one of the free daily’s hasn’t been pounding down my door, blowing my phone up trying to contract out my scribing talents. And here’s your answer. An illegal immigrant has my job.
Without a doubt if it weren’t for Jose Antonio Vargas I’d be working for the New Yorker right now, publishing scoops, lubing the deals, finding the next deep throat, you name it, I’d be on it. Certainly wouldn’t be sitting in my living room at 7 am scooping various news sites so I can regurgitate a few stories and add my own predictable commentary.
Bastard. Next thing you know you’re gonna be telling me that temporary labor job picking strawberries I was depending on this summer has gone to some illegal as well…WHAT? It has?!?! Son of a bitch.
