Nation of Immigrators - A public policy blog on America’s dysfunctional immigration system

All of us at times become dispirited.  

As I've viewed immigration over the last 40 years, passionate advocates have come and gone, fortunate foreign citizens have been granted green cards and then naturalized; but the harshness and hard-heartedness of immigration law as a reflection of American cultural norms hasn't really diminished.

For example, back in the 1980s I set a personal goal (to help end consular absolutism and introduce a measure of fairness into the visa process). In this, I have utterly failed, and have at times trended toward despondency.

Although some of the State Department's power has shifted to Homeland Security, State's Bureau of Consular Affairs has defended the prerogatives of consular officers like a hyper-vigilant Tiger Mom. Despite many articles, blog posts, ABA and AILA resolutions, and open-mike challenges at State Department public forums, visa refusals based on the decisions of consular officers on questions of fact remain virtually unassailable, as a March 28, 2013 decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals painfully affirmed.

But occasional discouragement is not  surrender.  As Martin Luther King, Jr., reminds and emboldens us, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Developments this past week in American immigration have proved him right.

On Friday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agreed to pay $1 million in settlement to a group of plaintiffs for early-morning home raids that terrorized their children. Adriana Aguilar, a U.S. citizen and the lead plaintiff, described the pain that jack-booted action by federal officers caused:

My son, who was just four years old, was crying in fear of gunmen in his home at four in the morning . . . We asked them to show a warrant or any other authority they had for being inside our home. They ignored us.

Earlier in the week, the Associated Press announced that it would no longer include the term, "illegal immigrant," in its authoritative Stylebook -- the journalist's bible. According to its Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll, the move is part of an ongoing effort by the AP to rid the Stylebook of labels (thus, schizophrenic is replaced by person afflicted with schizophrenia).   As she explained:

It’s kind of a lazy device that those of us who type for a living can become overly reliant on as a shortcut . . . It ends up pigeonholing people or creating long descriptive titles where you use some main event in someone’s life to become the modifier before their name.

Unpacking the AP move, MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry and a panel of thoughtful analysts offered a "MUST-WATCH" in-depth assessment of just how profound this arc-bending action in dropping the "illegal" slur is.  The panel likened the groundswell of opposition pressuring the AP on its use of the shortcuts, "illegals" and "illegal immigrant," to the lunchroom sit-ins of the Civil Rights Movement, when "colored" people were charged with illegality by virtue of geography, punished for where they sat on the planet or in the diner (or in the case of aspiring Americans, on the wrong side of a border):

Within hours of the AP change -- even faster than the two days after the Republican debacle at the polls it took Sean Hannity to flip on legalization -- the New York Times responded in kind.  Through its Public Editor, Margaret Sullivan (who last October declined to recommend any such change because readers wouldn't benefit), the Grey Lady announced that "for the past couple of months, [theTimes] has also been considering changes to its stylebook entry on this term and will probably announce them to staff members this week."

The last big thing came to view yesterday. The New York Times posted an obituary announcing the death on March 17 of Lawrence H. Fuchs. I didn't know or remember Mr. Fuchs, but the headline describing him as "Expert on Immigration," caught my eye. The obit alerted me to the seminal role he played leading up to the Reagan-era legalization program, describing him as "a federal government adviser [who in 1986] helped lay the groundwork for the last major overhaul of American immigration law."

Embarrassed about my unfamiliarity with Mr. Fuchs, and curious too, I Googled his name and found the preface to one of his books on Amazon. What he wrote there made me realize that immigration reform has already begun, that the great cultural integration of which he speaks began again -- like unseen swirls in the tide of change, cresting into huge waves bigger than Sandy -- on November 8:

Since the Second World War the national unity of Americans has been tied increasingly to a strong civic culture that permits and protects expressions of ethnic and religious diversity based on individual rights and that also inhibits and ameliorates conflict among religious, ethnic, and racial groups. It is the civic culture that unites Americans and protects their freedom—including their right to be ethnic. . . .

The system would not be severely tested as long as most immigrants were English or Scots. The new republic, as George Washington said in his farewell address, was united by “the same religion, manners, habits and political principles." But differences in religion, habit, and manners proliferated after the immigration of large numbers of Germans (many of whom were Catholic), Scandinavians and Irish Catholics throughout the last sixty years of the nineteenth century, and of eastern old southern Europeans, a majority of whom were Catholic or Jewish, in the decade before and after the turn of the twentieth. Political principles remained the core of national community. The new immigrants entered a process of ethnic-Americanization through participation in the political system, and, in so doing, established even more dearly the American civic culture as a basis of American unity.

The difference between 1990 (when Mr. Fuchs wrote, The American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity, and the Civic Culture) and now is that this time the acculturation occurred in reverse. Americans except on paper -- the DREAMers -- "established even more dearly the American civic culture as a basis of American unity" in a way that forced our language to adapt and their parents and themselves to be relieved of the smear "illegal." The revolution was not just televised, it was also publicized . . . by the Associated Press.

So watch out State.  I've got my metaphorical bow and quiver, and I'm still shooting arcing arrows of justice at consular absolutism!

From the first prehistoric evenings sitting around campfires, humans have been telling stories. Heroic myths, fairy-tale fables, oral histories -- all have been seared into heart and memory through the power of narrative. Civil and criminal trials are merely stylized forms of storytelling.  Journalism's hook, theatre's Sturm und Drang, reality television's sour and sweet confections -- all are bottomed on stories.

Although I've mentored dozens of able and bright immigration lawyers, some new, some not so, I continue to be amazed at how few appreciate the power of telling stories (double entendre intended).  Sadly, the unscrupulous -- the notarios, consultants and sleazebags with a law license -- know too well the power of storytelling -- but I'm talking about truthful, factual, accurate stories, not fabrications.

Some stories tell themselves, like the saga of my pro bono client, Shyima Hall.  Born in Alexandria, Egypt as Shyima Hassan, one of 11 children in a poor family, she is sold by her mother at age 9, and smuggled into America a year later to work for a wealthy Egyptian couple in my town, Irvine, California, a 'burb often rated, ironically, one of the most crime-free cities in America. After three years of captivity, working night and day for the couple and their five children, sleeping in their unheated, unlighted garage, washing her clothes in a bucket, she is spotted by a suspicious neighbor who tips off the police. The couple is convicted and Shyima is taken to Orangewood orphanage, then adopted by a foster couple, and along the way befriended by a compassionate agent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  

Shyima obtains a green card as a Special Immigrant Juvenile.  After high school, she travels around the country with ICE to speak about the dangers of human trafficking and urge trafficked victims to be brave and come forward. She volunteers with the Public Law Center, the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force, and other anti-slavery groups such as the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking. 

Years later, serendipity leads me to Shyima (who is now a young adult).  It prompted me on a whim to pop into the office of an ICE communications officer to say hello at the close of a USCIS California Service Center Stakeholders Meeting. The officer tells me about Shyima and her goal to become an ICE officer, but also of this amazing woman's preliminary need to find pro bono counsel who'll help her become a naturalized American. Asked to find Shyima pro bono counsel, I volunteer myself and my firm. The media have followed Shyima's story, since she was first released from captivity, and again just last week in this Los Angeles Times piece and this AP article as well as the following video, shot on the day of her oath-taking and embrace of American citizenship.

Not all immigration stories flow naturally with such a dramatic arc. Some are hidden and must be teased out and coaxed to appear. Immigration lawyers who can do this, in my view, "are worth their weight in gold," as another immigration-agency communications officer, Karen Kraushaar, once told the Washington Post (before she moved on to another federal job and later joined other women accusing Herman Cain of sexual misconduct  -- a totally different story in itself).

In truth, Ms. Kraushaar was referring to Immigration law's complexity ("[It's] a mystery and a mastery of obfuscation"). While surely the ability to traverse code sections, regulations, policy interpretations and institutional history matters (as the Supreme Court unanimously demonstrated this week in the Judulang case), that's not the whole story. 

Telling immigration stories matter(s) just as much, sometimes more. Good immigration stories entice.  Unlike the physical imprisonment of Shyima's Irvine garage, they create emotional captivity. They have the power, as in Shyima's case, to melt the (too-often) frozen heart of ICE. Take for instance the 50 real-life biographies depicted so well, with vivid photos and eloquent word pictures, in a new book, Green Card Stories. These stories, however, did not tell themselves.  They required worth-their-weight-in-gold immigration lawyers (mostly members of the Alliance of Business Immigration Lawyers) to bring them to life.

Immigration lawyers, paralegals, U.S. citizen spouses and families of the foreign born, employers of non-citizens, and would-be Green Card holders:  Read this book! It will inspire you to make your clients', families', employees' and your own Green Card stories a reality. These stories, like all well-told immigration biographies, humanize the demonized and prove that they are worthy of welcome. These dramatically revealed tales of truth and hardship, often extreme and exceptional, unmask the lies of the nativists and the naïve, who make or believe the make-believe memes about immigration, legal and illegal. They help us "Define American."

Writing for The Hill, pundit Kathy Kemper just published a thoughtful piece on "Debt and immigration."  In it she contrasts American policy-makers' obsession with the financial Sword of Damocles, set to behead us on August 2, with Norway's all-consuming focus on the aftermath of a xenophobic madman's gutless acts of murder and mayhem. 

Americans, it seems, can think only of financial insecurity (apparently because Casey Anthony remains in hiding), while Norwegians grapple with societal insecurities and aspirations, and ultimately, the proper response to racial and religious hatred.

Kemper reasons that security is about more than fiscal rectitude and the age-old debate over spending on guns versus butter:   

In reality, defending the homeland requires a continuous flow of the world’s best: individuals who understand the changing constellation of threats to our nation; discern which among those will grow more important in the years to come; and design “hard” systems and “soft” policies to respond to them dynamically.

There are at least two other reasons why immigration is so crucial:

(1) ‪It keeps our nation young. Indeed, if — and it’s a big if — we’re able to sustain our immigrant inflow, we should be able to avoid the demographic challenges that beset the EU and ‬Japan (and which, within another decade or two, will begin to take a toll on China).

(2) America, above all, is an idea, perhaps the most important component of which is openness: openness to people, to ideas, to risk taking. An America that closes itself off will guarantee its decline. Harvard University’s Joe Nye has argued that “the greatest danger to America is not debt, political paralysis or China; it is parochialism, turning away from the openness that is the source of its strength and resting on its laurels.”

If, as Kemper rightly posits, America is an idea, then to keep our mental synapses firing, we as a nation need many more immigration thought leaders. 

In the immigration sphere, thought leaders are not likely or often found in the halls of Congress.  Rather, they are all around us -- in our schools, coffee shops, law offices, think tanks and foundations.  They are Tweeters, bloggers, artists, activists, journalists and especially, DREAMers.  While they can be sighted in many places across the country, their numbers are insufficient to turn the tide of anti-immigrant hate speech, jingoism and Fortress-America messaging that passes as the "fair and balanced" offering of competing ideas. 

Immigration thought leadership is about speaking truth to power, about setting aside any pretense of faux objectivity, as Paul Krugman opined today in "The Centrist Cop-Out":

Some of us have long complained about the cult of “balance,” the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts.

I've thought quite a bit about the scarcity of immigration thought leadership (especially when my muse escapes me on any given Saturday as I scrounge for a fresh topic to post on dysfunctionality in our visa and entry policies).  Recently, Martindale-Connected, the social media site for lawyers, offered me the chance to ruminate on thought leadership via podcast (available here) and in writing here: "5 Steps to Go From Thoughtful Lawyer to Thought Leader on Social Media Sites (and Other Places)."

The five steps I described apply to any form of thought leadership, but especially to immigration and to budding thought leaders with no "Esq." after their names:

1. Thought Leadership Requires a Provocative and Enduring Topic. Blogging and article writing often serve as the centerpiece of many a thought-leadership strategy. More than a few lawyers who blog or write law-related articles, however, make the mistake of using the medium as merely a way of reporting on key cases and new statutes in order to demonstrate expertise in the subject. Thought leadership demands more. Thought leaders do not merely report new legal developments; they shed light on fundamental problems, offer critical analysis, discuss practical implications in the real world, and suggest solutions. Thought leaders are never boring. They take adverse possession from other lawyers over a particular area of law and own it by developing a voice and overcoming the fear of being too controversial. They select a topic that interests them (so that their passion remains on display), and a subject with legs that will generate eyeballs. One way to do this is by focusing on the actions of the government, federal or state, executive, legislative or judicial. As my blog www.NationOfImmigrators.com, illustrates, government officials are always doing something controversial that upsets someone. A controversial topic is one that readers naturally want to understand. The thought leader’s writings help them, over time, to understand the controversy and make up their own minds. Thought leaders are not afraid of controversy, but they always remember that they need not become the controversy.
2. Thought Leaders Are Remarkable and Grow a Tribe. Seth Godin is a maven of thought leadership. Among many of Seth’s suggestions, two stand out: A) Be remarkable; and B) Build a tribe. Thought leaders generate conversations. They are worthy of discussion among existing and prospective clients, colleagues, government officials and adversaries. They are remarkable. They are never boring or lackluster, and are not afraid of tooting their individual horns tastefully, for unless they do, they know that there might not be any music. Given these characteristics, thought leaders necessarily draw people to them. They form a tribe around their chosen topic, a community of interest, not necessarily all of like mind, that wants to know and learn more. Ask yourself, Attorney: Is your writing dull and soporific? Do you reflect your passion in your posts? Do you offer a point of view? Do you go outside your comfort zone in expressing yourself in visible ways? Are you operating from a Rolodex of disconnected people or have you built a network of thoughtful and interested members who see you as a thought leader? Do you share with your tribe the interesting thoughts of others? Do you connect tribe members with each other?
3. Thought Leaders Understand and Use Leverage. Thought leaders do not write single articles. They mount visibility campaigns around each and every article they author. Thought leaders know (no matter what a publisher says) to keep the copyright on their writings so that they can be repurposed in other publications, perhaps with an updated or tailored introduction to suit the new audience, or perhaps not. They Tweet and post status updates in Facebook and LinkedIn about every one of their articles, speeches, case victories (with client consent) or significant activities, offering link-backs to their analytical writings and their online profiles. They also regularly post links to new government announcements, new cases and statutes and the writings of others, usually also with a link to their own analysis of the latest development and its impact, and suggested strategies. They join and actively participate in Martindale Connected. They post articles on Google Knol and search for article directories to find additional opportunities and venues through which to post.
4. Thought Leaders are Disciplined and Reliable. No flash in the pan, thought leaders understand that consistent messaging, over time, with predictable regularity, is the only way to gain visibility and mindshare. Rain or shine, they write, post, update, Tweet and repeat the cycle, over and over. Too many lawyers think that one article every six months is enough to produce results. It is not. Thought leaders recognize that building a tribe means being responsible to your community. It is less a job than a calling. Nothing is worse for one’s reputation as a thought leader than a blog with a stale posting, months old, or the occasional posting, months apart.
5. Thought Leaders are Ethical and Responsible. Publicity without propriety does not a thought leader make. Thought leaders respect the rules of professional responsibility, refrain from misrepresenting the truth or engaging in personal attacks, label their writings as “attorney advertising” where required by state ethics rules, and do not take public positions that conflict with the interests of their clients. Thought leaders are not empty suits. They provide excellent client service and zealous advocacy, for these attributes are not only inherently important but also create the environment from which new insights and thoughts with which to exhibit leadership sprout.

If we Americans are to maintain our unhaughty claim of Exceptionalism, that is, our heritage as a perpetually vibrant and constantly replenished nation of immigrants, then we must produce many more thought leaders who can win what Kemper describes as the "debate over immigration [which] gets to who we are and, more importantly, who we will be." The growing ranks of immigration thought leaders, however, must not, as Krugman warns, make "nebulous calls for centrism, [the] big cop-out. . . that only encourages more bad behavior."  Rather, in my view, they must call out extremism wherever it surfaces and help direct our people to embrace the nation's true saving grace -- more enlightened and just immigration policies.