ALIENS OF EXTRAORDINARY ABILITY, ALIENS OF EXTRAORDINARY VULNERABILITY: SKILLED PROFESSIONALS AND CONTINGENT STATUS IN AMERICAN IMMIGRATION LAW

• Published date: 28 April 2005
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1521-6136(04)06009-9
• Pages: 165-183
• Date: 28 April 2005
• Author: John S. W. Park

ALIENS OF EXTRAORDINARY

ABILITY, ALIENS OF

EXTRAORDINARY VULNERABILITY:

SKILLED PROFESSIONALS AND

CONTINGENT STATUS IN AMERICAN

IMMIGRATION LAW

John S. W. Park

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a case study of a “non-immigrant” employed by a private

firm in the San Francisco Bay Area.As in all such cases, the employee’s legal

residency remainedcontingent upon his employment with the petitioning firm.

In other words, when the firm terminated him, he fell “out of status,” and

was forced either to find another petitioning firm, or to leave the country.The

case is instructive because its shows how American public law gives powerful

private entities – not just the state – the broad authority to determine the basic

terms of belonging for thousands of such persons.

THE FIRM

In the spring of 2000, I had been working at an immigration law firm in San

Francisco for about sevenmonths, and I had become hooked. It was hard to describe

Ethnographies of Law and Social Control

Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance, Volume6, 165–183

Copyright © 2005 by Elsevier Ltd.

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1521-6136/doi:10.1016/S1521-6136(04)06009-9

165

166 JOHN S. W. PARK

the feeling: the firm was an intense place, full of harried paralegals, last-minute

briefs to the federal courts, and attorneys who worked way too hard, often late into

the night. The attorneys at my firm cared deeply about their clients: their collective

commitment to the law, to a fair result, to a high degree of professionalism in

their work – these were especially refreshing for me after years and years of pain-

staking archival workon my dissertation. And there were also dramatic differences

in the work itself: no one cared and nothing seemed to happen when I published an

academic paper; but a bad brief meant that someone could get deported, and a good

petition or appeal could mean a new life in the United States, and in some cases, it

was literally like saving a person’slife. The law’s impact was more immediate and

more proximate, it was like fighting on the ground, often against the government,

using only words, and so it was something that deeply attracted me.

The two senior partners were almost like folk heroes in the community of

immigration lawyers in San Francisco.1David Chestnut came to California in

the 1960s, and he was very much a child of that era. He once joked that he had

originally come to the City to root for the Giants and to “find himself,” although

not necessarily in that order. In the neighborhood where he settled, he found a

community of Mexicans and Central and South Americans around the Mission

District, almost all of them undocumented immigrants, poor, or fleeing persecution

of one kind or another. Davebecame involved in the sanctuary movement, so much

so that he took a law degree at Golden Gate University so that he could represent

many of the families he had come to know as friends. His career from there was

legendary: he successfully built a practice out of a small office in the Mission

District, argued several important cases before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals,

and twice appeared before the United States Supreme Court in leading asylum

cases that are still “good law.” He didn’t do all this for money; like an idealist, he

went into the law to help his friends. Twentyyears later, he was doing pretty much

the same kind of thing, with the same level of enthusiasm and purpose, and even

during the baseball season.

But perhaps because his line of work wasn’t always profitable, his partner since

the mid-1980s, Anna Marcus, joined Dave in creating a firm that did business

immigration as well as criminal deportation, asylum, and immigration for family

reunification. Anna was no less an intense person: she was a self-described ardent

feminist from Swarthmore College who didn’t “take shit from anyone, especially

if they were from the INS.” Many of her early cases after law school were

in asylum and refugee law, but being a pragmatist as well as an idealist, she

developed specialties in business immigration, and she cultivated contacts with

some of the largest transnational companies in the Bay Area. She also developed

expertise in the immigration of the highly skilled and highly educated in general

– she was retained by Stanford as a consultant to help the University with their