One of the earliest things I read on VDARE.com, before I had even started working here myself, was Peter Brimelow's The Economist Magazine on Immigration, [March 11, 2000]. A British reporter from Planet Economist interviewed a poor illegal immigrant living in a trailer who "points to a picture of a daughter holding a high school graduation certificate". This made the reporter go all squishy—not recognizing, as Peter pointed out, that this "represents is another raid on the American taxpayer. Annual per pupil spending in Texas public schools averages over $5,000. ". [Nora, Maria and the American dream, Economist, March 9, 2000]

Now, K-12 education costs nearly $10,000 a year on average in California, according to the most recent (2006-7) estimate. In wealthy Mountain View, where Jose Antonio Vargas enrolled in school in 1993, it's certainly more.

And, of course, Vargas, a former reporter for the Washington Post and elsewhere, has just come out as an illegal immigrant—although of course he doesn't call himself that in his much-touted article My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant (New York Times, June 22, 2011).

Vargas also didn't say something else: If you come from a foreign country on a visitor's visa at age 12, saying you are only going to stay briefly with your grandparents and promising to leave again as all non-immigrant visa holders must do, and then stay for six years of school, you have in effect stolen $60,000 (6 x $10,000 in 2006-7 dollars) from the California taxpayer. (And much else besides—here [pdf] is a 2004 FAIR discussion of the cost of illegal immigration into California).

Simply put, Vargas is a thief—although, of course, part of the blame belongs to his parents and grandparents.

And to PJ (Pat) Hyland and Rich Fischer, respectively his high school principal and school superintendent, who conspired to cover up his status. Both are retired. (See Shelter From The Storm,  By Jose Antonio Vargas, Washington Post, November 6, 2005, in which he credits them with mentoring him, and being surrogate parents, but says nothing about his illegal status.)

Rich Fischer can be seen here talking about how he enabled Jose Vargas, and helped him to get an illegal drivers license, including teaching him to drive. The video is from the YouTube channel of the Soros-funded DefineAmerican.org, (see below) and incredibly, describes Fischer as "a member of Jose's personal 'Underground Railroad'"

The blog called Alien Rants suggests a number of people who could be investigated for aiding and abetting (harboring, the law calls it) his illegal status, including:

• Rich Fischer

• Pat Hyland

• Mary Moore (Fischer's assistant)

• Jim Strand, the venture capitalist who sponsored his scholarship.

• Peter Perl, Washington Post employee who was his mentor, and who he told about his illegal status

• Vargas' relatives, who paid to have him smuggled into the United States.

In outing himself, Vargas is also outing all of them.

Vargas reports a conversation with Peter Perl: "When you've done enough," he said, "we'll tell Don [Graham] and Len [Downie] together."

That would be the chairman of The Washington Post Company and the paper's executive editor—I would dearly love to see them charged with harboring, after years of sanctimonious WashPost editorials and slanted pro immigration reporting.

Vargas says he left without telling them. But how can we believe him? He's a self-confessed liar.

What exactly is the legal situation? We asked the whistle-blowing blogger calling himself Federale, whom we've cited many times. (See his Will A GOP Congress Block Obama's Ongoing Administrative Amnesty?). Federale replied:

"Several serious federal felonies were committed by many of the actors in this drama. The first and most egregious was of course the bringing of our little man to the United States in the first place, to wit: 8 USC 1323, Alien Smuggling, which dear departed Lolo and mother participated in. Not to mention passport and visa fraud, 18 USC 1546, Visa Fraud and 18 USC 1544, Forgery or Misuse of a Passport. The next serious crime was the fraudulent procurement of a Social Security Number.

"Next on the hit parade of the crimes Vargas participated in, but now as a responsible actor, perhaps, was the hiding of his status by his Principle, Pat Hyland and the school district superintendent Rich Fischer. They are liable for violations of Title 8 USC 1324, Harboring Illegal Aliens. It is very rare that school officials are prosecuted for such crimes, but in the past school officials did not actively participate in the crime, they usually just looked the other way. Now the so-called public servants who people the education field do not care about the law. They consider themselves above the United States Code that the rest of us have to obey or be imprisoned.

"But the most recent crimes were those committed by the WaPo and the San Francisco Chronicle. It is clear that the denials by the celebrity editor at the Chron [Phil Bronstein, email him] are transparent lies. Vargas was a three-fer at the Chron, which worships the homosexual, the minority, and the illegal alien.  A review of the Chron's Form I-9 Employment Eligibility Verification for Vargas will show either missing or incomplete information or no copies of the alleged SSN card or even a photo ID.

"But the most recent employer, the WaPo, has the most legal vulnerability. In the age of E-Verify, they have even more exposure than the Chron. The WaPo may have even received a SSA No-Match Letter since Vargas was there 5 years or more. That is why they tried to spike this story. Peter Perl should have already lawyered up, as Vargas spilled the beans to him and others at the WaPo and Vargas was not immediately terminated, much less reported to ICE, which shows the significant issue of intent is present in Perl's violation of 8 USC 1324.

"Also of interest is the Form I-9 at the Huffington Post. The HuffPo is as politically correct as the Chron and more than likely they overlooked any issue that would have jumped out on his SSN card or ID. He was a three-fer and deeply desired by fellow immigrant Arianna Huffington.

"So, lots of crimes to go around and ICE is still missing in action. And unlikely to do a thing. Criminal prosecution is good for some but apparently not for others.

"Of equal interest is that the Secret Service apparently allowed him access to the Bush White House with no verification of his identity. What if he had been a Moro?" [VDARE.com links added]

And then there's college. The unexamined assumption: Vargas got there because of his brilliance. The unspoken reality: he probably benefitted from Affirmative Action quotas, originally designed just for the descendants of African American slaves but paradoxically extended to immigrants.

Affirmative Action is a zero sum game. Because Vargas got into San Francisco State, some American not belonging to the "protected classes" (like Peter Brimelow's blond, blue-eyed baby son Alexander, cited to make exactly this point in the single most denounced passage of Alien Nation) did not.

Vargas is a Filipino rather than a Mexican, but because his name is "Hispanic" he counts as Hispanic for Affirmative Action purposes.

Almost all Federal and State funding for education, whether for scholarships or student loans, requires you to be either a citizen or a legal resident. But Vargas' mentors connected him with one that didn't:

"...a new scholarship fund for high-potential students who were usually the first in their families to attend college. Most important, the fund was not concerned with immigration status. I was among the first recipients, with the scholarship covering tuition, lodging, books and other expenses for my studies at San Francisco State University."

This costs a lot. Not only the full ride scholarship, intended for underprivileged Americans, but the taxpayer subsidies involved.

If Vargas had come straight from the Philippines as an adult and registered as a foreign student, he would have had to pay a lot more than he did. The fact that a State university charges less than Harvard doesn't mean it costs less to educate the student. It just means that someone else is paying it.

Let's say 4 years at $50,000 a year, added to the previous $60, 000 Vargas stole —say, $260,000.

And unlike Americans and legal resident students, Vargas doesn't have student loan to pay off.

That's a privilege only the underprivileged can claim. (By the way, the college thing was a waste of his time as well as your money—you do not need a college degree to be a journalist.)

The Affirmative Action subsidy followed Vargas into his professional life. Even apart from the displaced non-minority Americans, there are many Hispanic-surnamed cub reporters who could have taken an Affirmative Action slot at the Washington Post. And if Affirmative Action for Hispanics in journalism is supposed to enlist them as "native guides", reporting in the barrios and colonias springing up across the land because of immigration policy, Vargas still doesn't qualify—I don't think he even speaks Spanish.

Bryan Caplan, who's technically an economist, has posted an item saying that because Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize winner (or anyhow Pulitzer Prize sharer—he shared in the Washington Post's 2008 Pulitzer for...its coverage of the Virginia Tech Immigrant Mass Murder!!!), his immigration is an economic win for the United States:

"Has there ever been a better poster child for what I call "Meritocracy Without Borders" than Jose Antonio Vargas? The guy won a Pulitzer prize without the legal right to hold a job. Imagine what he could have accomplished free of the shackles of immigration law. Imagine." [Jose the Meritorious, EconLog, June 23, 2011]

What Caplan [Email him] doesn't understand is that Vargas is, as I've pointed out, almost completely atypical of illegal immigrants—and that no one knew, when he came to America as an illegal twelve year old, that he'd grow up to be a net taxpayer.

There are somewhere between ten and twenty million illegals who won't. And their US-born children and grandchildren won't either.

But there's more—and worse. Vargas has "founded" something called DefineAmerican.org, (contact it), an organization with him as a figurehead, intended to influence immigration policy by sentimentalizing it. From its website:

"Our campaign is about asking: How do we define an American? Why do people come to this country? Who are the American citizens who help them? When it comes to undocumented immigrants, what would you do? As a teacher? A friend? A mother?

"Define American, with your help, will answer those questions."

If Vargas succeeds in this, he will have cost America a lot more than the trivial quarter of a million dollars or so he may have taken for himself.

I put "founded" in quotes above—young journalists, even if legal, don't have the money to found organizations. According to its website:

"Define American is a project of the Tides Center, a nonprofit public charity."

Sounds familiar somehow...oh, yes, George Soros, liberal foundation money, that kind of thing.

The Tides Center has founded a lot of awful organizations, of which the most notorious is probably People for the American Way.

Let me tell you about another illegal alien journalist from the previous century—New York Times Editor A. M. Rosenthal, an illegal immigrant who was born in Canada, and was brought to the US during the Depression by his illegal immigrant father.

Rosenthal used his bully pulpit at the New York Times to decry all immigration enforcement, and to attack both Peter Brimelow and Arianna Huffington (legal immigrants) for daring to suggest immigration enforcement.

His article On My Mind; A Haitian Father, December 3, 1991, told his life story.

"Almost always now, when I read about Haitians who risk the seas to get to this country but wind up on distant shores behind barbed wire, I think of an illegal immigrant I happened to know myself, and of his daughters and his son.

"Then a shiver of shame and embarrassment goes through me, for a particular and large group of Americans.

"This fellow I am talking about needed work to help support his wife and six children. He was living at the time in Canada, where he had once found the outdoor work he loved—farming, laying track, traveling to the far country to trade. But work dried up in Canada, so he took the night train from Toronto to New York."

(You'll notice that Rosenthal senior wasn't fleeing persecution—Canada did not persecute anyone at the time. He was just trying to take an American job.)

"This man, who was known as Harry, never told his children exactly how he managed to cross the border. After Harry died, immigration authorities could never discover any record of his entry, or of his son's, who was also on that train from Toronto. They both were declared illegals—night-train wetbacks. "

The son, A. M. Rosenthal, found out that he was illegal some time when he was a teenager, and I believe managed to legalize himself by going to Canada and re-entering legally.

It was perfectly reasonable for immigration authorities to allow him to do that at the time.

But from the point of view of America, it was a mistake. Given Rosenthal's idea that now that he and his father had gotten away with illegal immigration, everyone should be allowed to do so, and his unusual amount of influence as publisher of the New York Times, he's a perfect example of "How Immigration Leads To Open Borders", as Lawrence Auster wrote on View From The Right [May 27, 2006]:

" Folks, I ask again the question that I first asked in Huddled Clichés in 1997, and more recently at VFR, in response to the extraordinary statements coming from Jews and Jewish organizations that Jews are required by their Jewishness and their immigration history to believe in open borders:

"If America had known when admitting Jewish immigrants between 1880 and 1920 that the descendants of those immigrants would oppose America's right to have any future control over immigration, would America have admitted those immigrants in the first place?

"As a descendant of Eastern Europe Jews, I never would have imagined that to be descended from immigrants requires a person to have more allegiance to future prospective immigrants than to America; nor would most European-Americans who are descended from 19th and early 20th century immigrants imagine such a thing. But many Jews, as well as many Catholics, think otherwise...

"I say that this is a legitimate point to make to the open-borders Jews and Catholics. "Was this part of the deal when your grandparents were admitted into America? That the fact that America let your grandparents into this country requires you to subvert America's national existence? In that case, your grandparents shouldn't have been admitted in the first place."

Well, maybe.

But today's America should absolutely deport Jose Antonio Vargas. I foresee a bright future for him, with his expensive stolen education, as a foreign correspondent in Manila.p