Undocumented Immigrants: What Teachers Need to Know

The $6.7 billion Florida citrus industry owes a lot to Lue Gim Gong’s mother. She taught her son pollination techniques while raising him in China. As an adult in the U.S., he would use those techniques to breed so many valuable new varieties of fruits that he gained the nickname the “Citrus Wizard.”

American farmers almost missed the opportunity to benefit from Lue Gim Gong’s expertise. The Chinese Exclusion Act barred him from entering the U.S., but he managed to get around it with forged documents and the support of a family farm in Florida. There he focused on cultivating plants that were resistant to early Florida frosts that could wipe out a farmer’s livelihood. He developed tomatoes with higher yields and grapefruits that dropped at optimal times; but he is best known for developing an early-ripening variety of sweet orange that bears his name. The Lue Gim Gong variety of the Valencia orange is still popular more than a century later and has saved the farming industry millions of dollars.  

Lue Gim Gong was among the first undocumented immigrants to the United States. Before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, there were no federal laws dictating who could or couldn’t enter the country, so it was impossible to enter “illegally.” The act was passed due to the perception that Chinese Americans were stealing jobs from U.S.-born Americans, despite these immigrants making up just 0.002 percent of the population. This led to widespread discrimination and excluded many people from contributing more to the United States.

At 30 years old, Jose Antonio Vargas had what appeared to be an enviably successful life. After coming to the U.S. from the Philippines to live with his grandparents at age 12, he earned a full scholarship to college and took a series of prestigious journalism jobs that netted him a Pulitzer Prize among other accolades. Vargas risked it all when he wrote the New York Times article “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant,” which detailed how he had navigated his life after discovering he was undocumented as a teen. In “coming out” as an undocumented immigrant, he put himself at risk of deportation, but he was inspired by the young activists who were sharing their legal status to fight for immigration reform. In the article, he wrote, “I’m done running … . I’ve decided to come forward, own up to what I’ve done.”

In the years since, Vargas has certainly done so. He founded the not-for-profit Define American, which works to change the prevailing narrative about undocumented immigrants and share facts about immigration in the U.S. Vargas has also highlighted the unique challenges facing LGBTQIA+ undocumented immigrants like himself, who until recently, were unable to regularize their status via a federally recognized same-sex marriage. He continued to share his own story via the documentary Documented: A film by an undocumented American, the book Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen and testimony in front of Congress. He used his new status as the most famous openly undocumented American to advocate for other people in less-privileged positions.

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio made waves when she “came out” as undocumented shortly before graduating from Harvard. Her extraordinary story as the first openly undocumented immigrant to graduate from Harvard was shocking, but Villavicencio turned down the immediate offers to pen a memoir. Instead, she decided to share the stories of people less privileged than her, traveling the country to interview farm workers, delivery workers and other undocumented blue-collar workers. 

She began writing the morning after the 2016 election. The resulting book, The Undocumented Americans, was recognized by the New York Times for covering “vigilantly guarded communities whose stories are largely absent from modern journalism and literature.” Villavicencio has recently received permanent residency but plans on continuing to write and share the stories of undocumented Americans.