It was during the naturalization ceremony of my mother-in-law in Los Angeles, when I got my first glance at the immigrant’s American Dream: a packed auditorium of new US-citizens, exhilarated, proud and happy. When I read Jose Antonio Vargas’s article “OUTLAW: My Life As an Undocumented Immigrant” last week in The New York Times Magazine, I saw the unfulfilled version of this dream. In his article, Vargas gives an unexpected face to the more than eleven million undocumented immigrants living in the US: his own! As a successful journalist, Vargas uses his power to challenge the idea of what a US-American is. As much as I admire Vargas’s courage and hope it is not in vain, his claims are neither unambiguous nor unproblematic. On what grounds do they stand? Legality? Practice? Culture? Also, while Vargas intends to move the boundaries of what constitutes a US-American in the authoritative framework of the nation-state, do his claims not reach further? Do they not challenge the nation-state USA in terms of authoritative legitimacy? Following Vargas’s recent video on DefineAmerican.com, I want to take on his plea: “Let’s talk.”

“There are believed to be 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. We’re not always who you think we are. Some pick your strawberries or care for your children. Some are in high school or college. And some, it turns out, write news articles you might read. I grew up here. This is my home. Yet even though I think of myself as an American and consider America my country, my country doesn’t think of me as one of its own.”

The statement in the beginning of Vargas article shows two problems:

1. The general problem of the USA in sustaining a historically grown, economically integrated and sizable group of undocumented immigrants.

2. The paradoxical life-situation of these immigrants as being part of a social whole, without being legally recognized.

Where is this boundary of recognition drawn? Is it really just a matter of a piece of paper? This is what Vargas claims, as he lays out his argument woven through his life-story. Vargas came as an undocumented immigrant from the Philippines. He did not know this until he was 16 when he realized he had a fake Green Card. He still was able to get a high school and college education, work for major newspapers from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times and win a Pulitzer Prize, while hiding his lack of legal status. This is the societal basis on which he claims being American: as a successful member of society, contributing and paying taxes. But is this really all that constitutes American identity?

Ferdinand Toennies in his famous dichotomy of “Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft” defines society as based on the individual will, constituted through the social interactions this will produces. These interactions create practices, customs and laws that not only govern, but define society. The problem in Vargas’s claim is that by entering society as an undocumented immigrant, he violated a fundamental structure of law, first unknowingly, but later consciously. In terms of legality, can he really claim membership? This is at least questionable, but of course the legal frame of society is moveable. The “Dream Act” (interestingly enough just made one of its occasional reappearances on the legislative agenda) would provide such a legal shift, but as it stands will be rejected again.

The strong appeal of Vargas’s case for me actually does not lie in his claim of being US-American on the basis of society, but rather, community. Toennies defines community as social organization based on commonality. In a very 19^th century view of this conception, he specifies it in terms of the nation that this commonality is based, to different degrees, on: territory, blood (heritage) and shared beliefs (or more implicit practices leading to values). The larger communal aspect of the US nation-state is not based on blood (let’s ignore the nativism movement), but on territory, shared practice and beliefs. This is significantly different compared to other nation-states (such as my native land, Germany) that base the community of the nation mainly on blood (or at least did until 2000), which is much more exclusive. Vargas goes through some length to show how he learned, embraced and embodied language and American popular culture, how his life experience, beyond the document issue, does follow the shared practice and institutional education which makes US-Americans (Toennies actually points out that this is an important factor of communal identity formation). In terms of this understanding, Vargas truly is a US-American.

Vargas’s claim of belonging on the basis of community is therefore strong and much less conflicted than his claim on the basis of society. But the nation-state in general is an unfortunately very muddled conception based on both community and society. This becomes pretty clear if one considers again the issue of legality. I would argue that the violation of the legal structure of society has much larger implications in terms of being US-American than Vargas acknowledges. If he were right in his claim that initial legal status does not matter, that only life-practice counts, what does this mean for all the actually documented immigrants in the US? The immigrant experience – especially in the US-case – is a vital part of community, but it is based on the legal frame of society. Through their immigration practice US-society extends its reach across the borders of its territory. The filing of paper-work, waiting for permission, and interviews, are a vital part of the US-immigrant experience – starting before crossing the border. Vargas’s claim to basically decouple the definition of being US-American from the legal status of entry would not only challenge the legal system of migration. It essentially renders an important part of what has been a communal identity-building process for generations of immigrants meaningless.

Vargas’s important claims surprisingly leave the authoritative potential of borders and territory unchallenged: when he wants to “Define American,” he ignores the conception of legality that marks the boundaries of the territory. His whole claim is based on being in the USA, not how he got there. As much as I sympathize with Vargas and as much as I hope that his act revitalizes the debate and leads to change, his critique remains in the frame of the nation-state concept in general without challenging its authority. He therefore just moves the internal boundaries of definition. If one would take Vargas’s claims further, they actually can be redefined as potentialities:

1.    On the basis of society: everybody in the world can be a member of US-society. They just have to contribute.

2.    On the basis of community: everybody can be a member of the US-community. They just have to share practices and values.

Can these two potentialities only be realized on US-territory? If not, then the concept of the US nation-state is meaningless. If yes, we come back to Vargas’s initial problems, as it just shows the arbitrariness and injustice of the boundaries of territory, especially with existing and tolerated practices of undocumented migration. In trying to “Define American” Vargas implicitly puts his finger on the wound of the general legitimating problem of the nation-state in a globally interconnected world of politics, economy and culture. This is of course a very radical reading of Vargas’s claims, but to say it with his words: “Let’s talk.”

A friend of mine was asking for help in downloading The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers for free. In December, I thought about downloading the book for ten dollars to my iPod, but didn’t think it was worth it. I think I was afraid it would burst me from my bubble.

This morning while watching the movie “The Truman Show” with my students, I realized that like Jim Carrey’s character, Truman Burbank, I am living in a similar scenario, “The China Show.” When someone wants to know about the history of the Communist Party, or tries to tell the difference between President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, (even the NY Times can’t), it feels like they want to know about the executive producers behind the scenes who are responsible for making sure that the show doesn’t stop.

Here on the set of “The China Show” we worry about the incredibly expensive price of apartments, and students play the Three Kingdoms game. As my Chinese teacher pointed out, the movies and the television shows in China are harmonious, befitting a harmonious society, a path set by President Hu Jintao. I tell people that the Chinese movies I watch in the United States, outside the television studio, are what might be called “art house films,” often intentionally banned within China to get more viewers in the U.S. and Europe. These movies are about people stealing police uniforms and using them to extort pedestrians on the street, or the woman who is sent to the fields and becomes a one-person brothel in an attempt to regain her old city life. Back within “The China Show,” the movies are about people from an ancient period, quite often with the ability to fly.

Last week, I had a brief moment where I felt like I was teaching, using clips of movies like “Forrest Gump” to talk about school integration and the Vietnam War draft. I asked one of my students what she would do if her friend was drafted and sent to the Vietnam War, “Would you want to watch the news, or just ignore the whole thing?” She replied, “I wouldn’t watch the news.”

This week, many of my students returned from their attempts to leave “The China Show” through obtaining visas to study in the U.S. Some were successful and some were not. Like my student who would not want to watch news about the Vietnam War, these students did not want to do anything in class that required critical thought or analysis. Talk about the economy and other finance-related discussions, such as finding an internship when no hope of a job exists, quickly dissolved into movie-watching and playing computer games. As a dutiful cast member of “The China Show,” I put on movies, TV shows and cartoons, full of people flying and bending water. All of this entertainment and more is free here in China.

As I walked along a street with a former co-worker, I told her that this was supposed to be the site of some protests planned via the Internet. She couldn’t understand why, since she believed there was nothing wrong in China. Like the traffic that magically appeared to keep Truman from leaving the show, street sweeper trucks appeared out of nowhere and did a dutiful job of making sure that every inch of the pedestrian street was cleaned regularly, both of dirt and potential trouble makers. When I mentioned to my Chinese teacher that a friend’s husband had been in jail for two months for trying to protect citizens’ rights, there was a look of confusion on my teacher’s face. These stories didn’t correspond with a harmonious plotline.

Lately, I have been trying to get a job teaching about environmentalism here in China. The Deans of different study abroad programs regularly tell me that students from the U.S. are not interested – the interest is in the politics of producing “The China Show.” Students want to know about what’s going on behind the scenes, but for me this is too tiring. I want to be able to better understand those I meet everyday on the streets. The Communist Party members preparing to celebrate their founding 90 years ago are untouchable and rarely seen, living behind red brick walls, perhaps in some ways like studio walls.

A friend of mine who teaches international relations has not let the Communist Party dissuade him. He can rattle off cast members of “The China Show” like it’s his family tree as I stare in befuddlement. However, the problem for me is that I’m still not sure if I should try and do the same, or if I should just join the conversations with the common cast members, I mean citizens, talking about the expensive apartments like we did last week, last month and last year, and putting on more cartoons about air-benders to keep the students entertained.