Another day, another story about immigration-law processes in the MSM. This one is the Washington Post with an article about the increasing popularity of immigration clinics at law schools, which ought to be reassuring but instead is just hugely depressing.
Apparently, despite sources at a number of schools, the Post couldn’t find anyone who had actually gone into practice advocating for immigrants after participating in one of these clinics as a law student. The best they could do was a current student who “definitely plans to” do so, and an alumna who’s now a lawyer for the government because she wants to “push for the middle.” (Because if we’ve learned anything from Guantanamo, it’s that moderate-minded lawyers have high efficacy and job satisfaction.)
Don’t get me wrong; I appreciate that the clinic system allows immigrants — not to mention disadvantaged clients of other clinics — access to talented legal minds. But it seems to me that rather than giving students a taste of a field that leads them to develop a career interest, clinics actually have the effect of allowing students to quiet their consciences when they take the (lucrative) beaten path after graduation: “Hey, I did the do-gooder thing back in law school, I’ve done my part.” Part of this might be that the culture of law schools does a lot to encourage defeatist attitudes toward social-justice-y but unglamorous areas of legal practice.
The perspective this enables is one I’ve run into most frequently in high-school theatre. Sure, students appreciate the opportunity to get out and do what they love, not to mention the recognition: from what I know of pre-law undergrads, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the prestige of “hot” immigration clinics drew ambitious students who didn’t much care about immigration. But regardless of how fulfilling they find it now, they shrug it off with “but of course I’m not crazy enough to do it for a living.”
What we seem to be left with is a system where the ranks of immigration lawyers are populated by clinic students on one side, and clinic alumni on the other. That bodes poorly for the students — not to mention those they represent.
The table next to me at the Cosi where I’m blogging is occupied by two young lawyers, one of whom just said to the other: “But I’m just out of law school, I couldn’t just go work for the Obama campaign.” Case in point?
It seems like you have to bring money back into this equation. First, you graduate law school up to your ears in debt. I know two immigration lawyers. Both spent a couple years in big firms first, because they had to. Once you’re in though, the decision to leave is a very different one from what you choose right out of law school.
Second, both of the immigration lawyers I know do not work in for-profit firms. One works for a quasi-governmental organization, the other for a non-profit. Both are really stuck for staff, but they’re far more stuck for funds. In the current atmosphere, I can’t imagine that the money going to immigration law (not the for-profit handling of visa cases and such but the kind that you practice in clinics) is flowing too fast.
Actually, there is a market for for-profit immigration lawyers. Plenty of cases that are less straightforward than “you came here illegally and now they want to send you back” come from clients who have some money: holders of expired visas, divorcees of visa marriages, immigrants seeking waivers on the basis of “exceptional talent,” etc. (And the free trainings the Bar Association for immigration lawyers offers means it’s relatively easy to gain expertise and stay up-to-date, an advantage many politically sensitive fields don’t share, if my understanding is correct.) I’d assume that students who have worked in legal clinics are aware of this, and if they’re not that’s because they’ve already assumed that Helpful Law and Lucrative Law are mutually exclusive.
Second of all, the students interviewed in the article aren’t talking about coming back to immigration law after they’ve established themselves, because they don’t seem to want to do immigration law. Maybe I underestimate the extent to which it’s embarrassing to discuss law-school debt with a reporter, but none of them even seem to find the prospect attractive: it’s unfair, it’s overpoliticized, it’s difficult. One would think that if they planned to get out of debt and then do what they wanted, they’d say so.