17.06.2012. Sometimes you risk your own life to free yourself from it.
Around this time last year, two months before my 30th birthday, I was at the height of my professional career and fielded various job opportunities: perhaps writing for magazines (I had just profiled Mark Zuckerberg for The New Yorker); maybe serving as editor of a news website (or starting a news website); or selling a book proposal on an idea that I had been reporting on and felt most excited about -- that we're all living under a growing "Click-o-cracy," one nation under Facebook, Google and Twitter, with video, texting and email for all. What are our rights, privileges and limitations, individually and collectively, in this unprecedented global social order?
But before my professional life and personal life -- the two are inseparable for a writer -- could go on, I finally decided that I had to reveal a central fact about myself: that I am an undocumented American, what many people call an "illegal alien" or, worse, an "illegal." Before I could explore the nature of global citizenry, I had to first come to grips with my reality in a country that I've called my home. Though I consider myself an American at heart, I am not an American on paper. And I'm just one person and mine is merely one story -- one of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants whose lives are interwoven and integrated with those of American citizens. We are here. We are part of you.
In the coming months, I'll be reporting and writing more about immigration -- which, at bottom, is more than about immigration. It's about the very question of American identity itself, about who we are as a country and whom we consider to be Americans. How do you define American?
