Outlaw: My Life In America As An Undocumented Immigrant

In the process of working toward the American Dream, people struggle to fit in, to belong, to be accepted. For many of them, an important part of the American Dream is the chance to reinvent themselves—the opportunity to become someone different, someone better. In “Outlaw: My Life in America as an Undocumented Immigrant”, Jose Antonio Vargas is an “undocumented immigrant” who has been living illegally in the U.S. since he was twelve years old. To chase his American dreams, he embodied a lie until it became unbearable and he expose his truth and let the masks crumble onto the ground. In “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, Martin Luther King Jr. broke unjust laws and engaged in nonviolence direct action in order to pursue his American dream of equality and freedom. From Vargas to

Chase dreams even if doing so is technically illegal. Throughout history, we have celebrated those who disobey unjust laws in the name of justice. Take Martin Luther King for example. “A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right of vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law.”(King, p469) However, all sorts of devious methods were used to prevent the colored from becoming registered voters. All men are created equal, but the colored were not given the equal rights to vote nor were they treated equally at that time. An unjust law is no law at all. Thus, why should the colored obey laws that were unjust? They had not only a legal and a moral responsibility to obey just laws, but a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. Undocumented immigrants today are carrying the torch of King. Immigrant-rights activist Jose Antonio Vargas has written extensively about the fact that