.png)
Agustina Vergara Cid is an alumni of the contributor program and she is starting a new role as the Editorial Manager of Reason Magazine.
Agustina Vergara Cid’s Impact Interview:
You've been one of our most active contributors in the Young Voices programming, and you've received a fair amount of success as a result. Since you joined the contributor program, what is the biggest way that your writing during the Contributor Program has impacted your career?
The placements I’ve gotten through the program have helped me build a strong portfolio.
But what I value most is the experience it gave me. The key to becoming a good writer is writing a lot and getting edited a lot, and the program gave me both. I’ve improved dramatically through the volume of work I’ve produced and the extremely competent and valuable feedback from YV editors.
It also exposed me to working with a range of outlets and taught me how to communicate professionally in the publishing world. That kind of experience is priceless and I wouldn’t have been able to get it a efficiently and quickly without the program.
You've primarily covered immigration in your writing. What would you like more Americans to understand when discussing such a complicated and controversial topic?
I’d like them to rethink whether what we’re doing with immigration truly reflects our values. The immigration debate, and the system itself, are shaped by collectivist premises that clash with the individualism of the American founding and the values we hold as Americans.
Americans believe in work, ambition, and individual freedom. Yet the system often criminalizes or severely restricts exactly that: people coming here to build a life through voluntary exchange. That doesn’t only limits the freedom of immigrants, it limits the freedoms of Americans who want to trade and otherwise associate with them.
A truly American immigration system would respect the freedom of both immigrants and citizens, while establishing rational restrictions on who gets to come here to protect individual rights.
Which media placement that the Young Voices content team helped you place are you most proud of?
My YV debut was on Newsweek, which was a huge deal to me! I’ll always be proud of and grateful for that one. More recently, I got placed in The Telegraph, where I got to communicate to their large audience some of the issues surrounding the new fee for H-1B visas. My appearances in The Young Turks network have been valuable too— it’s an audience I don’t normally reach, and that I’ve been able to expose to my pro-freedom, capitalistic position on immigration policy.
You're starting a new role at Reason Magazine as their Editorial Manager. What drew you to this role and what excites you the most about it?
I’ve been a fan of Reason for years. When YV paired me with Jason Russell (managing editor at Reason) as part of the mentorship program, I was eager to learn from him not just about writing, but about how a major publication like Reason functions editorially. Jason’s account was incredibly interesting to me, as I find editorial operations fascinating.
I later became managing editor at the Ayn Rand Institute, where that interest deepened through hands-on experience. And now, in this role at Reason, I’ll be helping manage editorial workflows and support writers in producing the high-quality, impactful work Reason is known for. And I’ll get to do that while advancing the cause of freedom in the most effective publication to ever do it, so that’s massively exciting.
What would you say to a young person trying to get their footing and build a career as a journalist in the digital age?
Two pieces of advice:
Support Young Voices' work in empowering rising leaders for liberty like Agustina!
