What are the pros and cons of becoming an immigration attorney?
Friday, October 30th, 2009 at
10:12 am
My daughter is a sophomore in college. She is a very good student and gets good grades. She has very good skills in English ( writing, editing, verbal skills). She needs to choose a major Cheap Viagra Online Without Prescription and doesn’t know what to do. I suggested that maybe she could look into getting a major in English, and then go on to law school. She is considering that, but we just don’t know much about what type of law she should consider getting into.
Being an immigration attorney is fantastic for those who truly believe in what they are doing and the ethical obligations. The money however is not that great. Perhaps specialise in a law profession that would allow her to be employed privately.
First of all being an immigration attorney is like going from chasing ambulances to chasing illegals. One pays with American dollars and the other with pesos, tomatoes, chilly peppers and pennies.
don’t do it !!
You are a good mom for helping your daughter, I wish my parents had been as insterested. The major your daughter selects in college has very little to do with law school. Law schools do not look at particular undergrad courses, they are more concerned with the overall grade. Lawyers have all types of undergrad degrees and majors. Your daughter should select a major that she enjoys and will get good grades in.
As for law school, sometime in her senior year of college she will take the LSAT (a national entrance exam for law schools). She should take a prep course on how to do well in that exam. The best way to get a good LSAT grade is to take and re-take and re-take the sample exams and previous years exams that have been released to the public.
With an LSAT score and college grades she will then apply to law school. Law school is not the kind and fair bastion of learning that we all wish it was. The courses are very tough, the profs are rude, the expense is high, and in the end there is no guarantee she will ever be employed as an attorney. I found law school to be years of hazing by profs who knew the subjects they taught but had no clue how to apply that to the real world. So, your daughter must be very, very sure that law is what she wants. Law schools, similar to the Army, teach by breaking the person down — for many of us that does not work.
The goal of today’s law school is to have a large number of students graduate and pass the bar exam. In your research on law schools you will see that number used as a measure of the quality of the school. What that has done is that law school training, as esoteric as it always was, now adds bar exam training. Bottom line is that a person who graduates law school and passes the bar usually has no idea how to actually work as a lawyer. It is a tough road and your daughter will need commitment.
There is no need for her to decide what type of lawyer she want to me now. A lot changes once a person is in law school and is able to take classes pertaining to that type of law. Go to http://www.abanet.org/legaled.html that is the American Bar Assoc site for those interested in becoming a lawyer.
// Answer assumes question is posed by a resident of the U.S.A. //
First off, she should schedule a consultation with her college’s career-placement office and ask about summer internships. If she would be studying law with the goal of working in a specific field, it’s never too early for practical exposure.
She could also look at the web pages of various organizations specialized in immigration issues. Think tanks, professional associations etc. are all resources for further information, networking, and perhaps even internships.
// NB: links provided for information only. Neither Answerer nor Yahoo! Answers approves nor endorses the purposes, principles or politics of any of the following organizations. //
ABA Commission on Immigration
http://www.abanet.org/publicserv/immigration/home.html
American Immigration Law Foundation
http://www.ailf.org/
American Immigration Lawyers Association
http://www.aila.org/
Federation for American Immigration Reform
http://www.fairus.org
Georgetown Immigration Law Journal
http://www.law.georgetown.edu/journals/gilj/
National Immigration Forum
http://www.immigrationforum.org/
National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild
http://www.nationalimmigrationproject.org
The National Immigration Law Center
http://www.nilc.org/
An informal source of information is blogs (or "blawgs") of immigration lawyers. Some are news-focused, some are practice-oriented. Generally one can leave comments, and often the blogger will respond.
Second, if she =does= choose to enter immigration law, she should find a way to go to law school without incurring any debt. I’d personally advise against choosing a law school based solely on an immigration program.
Third, this directory for law students has contact info that might lead to an undergrad volunteer project:
Immigration Detainee Defense Initiative Directory: Opportunities for Law Students to Work Justice in the Lives of Detained Immigrants and Refugees, American Bar Association Commission on Immigration et al., 2003.
Now, to your question. The answer varies depending on the level at which your daughter chooses and is qualified to work. A human rights law partner based near the Hague will work very differently than will a lawyer in the human resources department of a multinational company, who’ll work very differently than will a solo practitioner in a mid-sized city.
Your question includes myriad indications that your daughter will be working at the small-practice or solo practitioner options. (N.B.: High-flyers like Karin Wolman, though fine role models, et al are not representative examples of their category.)
Advantages of being an immigration lawyer in a small or solo practice:
- contact with other cultures
- lots of short-lifespan cases means frequent feeling of job well done
- workwear can be low-budget
- no corporate rat-race (advantage if that’s something she wants to avoid)
- diverse field
- very personal contact with client – your work affects their lives in ways you can almost taste
- multi-faceted workload
- intellectually stimulating, given constant national and international policy changes
- no due-diligence assignments (advantage if she wants to be a lawyer but not spend 20-hour days sifting through thousands of boxes full of files opposing counsel generated in hopes she won’t discover the one page that’ll win her firm’s client’s case)
- won’t threaten potential marriage partners who want their wife to officially have a good job while primarily being available to meet their needs
- work will make you feel privileged
Disadvantages:
- some cases do drag on for ages, leaving clients in state of limbo and you quite a few dollars short
- won’t be able to buy parents a retirement home in Maui (from legally earned income, anyway)
- low pay makes it tough to resist grey-area income
see: http://www.usdoj.gov/eoir/press/05/AttyDisc030105.htm
for a small selection of the very small minority of offenders who got caught
- lots of paperwork
- will see a lot of couples getting married where only one of them thinks its love (hint: it’s not the attractive, socially-adept foreigner)
- will end up doing a lot of soup-to-nuts law for clients who initially came for immigration stuff
- "helping people" pay-off dampens after she hears about yet another cynical but connected colleague’s success helping privileged people through the system, while she’s fighting an uphill battle against a faceless bureaucracy for her underprivileged clients
- she’ll have taken lots of law courses not relevant to her work, while accredited representatives (officially "approved" non-lawyers who are allowed to practice immigration law before the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security) didn’t have to sit through Contracts or Torts.
- what’s worse than lawyer jokes? the jokes lawyers make about immigration lawyers.
Regarding salary stats, a view from the client side:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_does_a_immigration_lawyer_make