"But I'm just trying to be like you said."

It was one of those convoluted cases you get in immigration law where you have to go all the way around your elbow to get to your thumb. The doctor was from Sudan. Like so many men of science, he had in his youth made the mistake of assuming that his country’s body politic would thank him for his constructive criticism. Fleeing enemies in high places, he and his family crossed, like The Sound of Music, into the United Arab Emirates.

Like so many countries in the region, the UAE has no immigration law and no refugee law to speak of, although it is no exaggeration to say that practically the entire civilian workforce is foreign-born. It’s safe there. Employers are generous. Oh, you have to know your place. Your employer will hold your passport. You will never own a piece of this country. Your children born here will never become citizens. When you retire, you will be given the length of your unspent leave to pack up and go home. But if you squint, it looks like you have something.

The doctor filed for the US visa lottery and got it. With high hopes, he shipped the whole family to the land of liberty. But when he got here, he was astonished to find that his medical degree, though Western, was useless and his former life of docility had unfit him for the whole unseemly business of marketing himself. And so, before his leave was spent, he high-tailed it back to the UAE, where he was a respected, separate but equal, professional.

There is time, he thought. I cannot risk this. My mother, my sisters, my wife, my children – twelve people depend on me. I will send the older children on ahead. Then, when I have built a nest egg, I will retire there. Every year, he would take his (very generous) vacation time, and he would spend it “job hunting” in the US, and every year he would turn back.

Until one visit, when he was picked up, shackled, and run through the ringer for having “relinquished” his permanent residence, which is, when you think about it, the most preposterous legal fiction. As if anyone would do such a thing – relinquish his right to live in his home -- home, by now, to his wife, and all of the children. What he was really guilty of was the crime of ambivalence, of insufficient gratitude to the country that had rescued him from the third world.

He was also the victim of an unannounced policy shift. Government counsel sneered, “He’s just using his greencard as an entry-exit visa.” Shocked, shocked. As if the sheer sinister import of using your greencard as an entry-exit visa were obvious. What had been malum prohibitum had suddenly become malum in se.

This man was my very first client, and he was perfect because he represented all that there is in this practice. He was, if you cocked your head one way, a freedom fighter, suffering in exile; or, if you wanted him to be, he could also be a craven liar, trying to pull one over on Uncle Sam. He was bewildered and imploring and sad, but a proud paterfamilias given to opining aloud as to possible medical ailments behind his jailers’ nasty behavior. He was exasperating and charming. He said I was like a daughter.

But the element of that first case that is the most characteristic of all is that, having gotten up a righteous head of steam about the principles and equities at stake, it all came down to procedure and bureaucracy in the end. I thought I could win this case. I really did. But the case would not be heard for months, so pursuing the case meant that he would not make it back for his final year of employment in UAE – the year that would qualify him for retirement. He wanted a resolution – any resolution – now.

We tried to negotiate something, but government counsel wouldn’t budge. Thus, trying to make up for my failures with familiarity, I offered him a ride home. In the car he told me that he wasn’t sure that this outcome wasn’t for the best. America was too much for him anyway – cold, alienated. He said he wasn’t sure that one could live a moral life here. I said I knew what he meant and I did, but, ever the ambassador, I added, I will say this about Americans, though. They take what is theirs. I said, with all due respect, I can’t even get my American head around why the ninety percent of you who have none of the power in the country you’re trying so hard to get back to – why you don’t rise up and chop heads.

The next day I was closing out his case when I got a phone call. It was Homeland Security. My guy had taken it upon himself to hold his own personal vigil outside government counsel’s office until someone gave him redress. They put him on the phone and I laid into him. What are you nuts? He said, I’m just trying to be like you said – American. And the next thing I knew they were dismissing his case and handing him his passport.

I didn’t know whether to chalk that up as a win or a loss or how to bill for it, but it made me think. I grew up hearing the Horatio Alger story from my parents about grandma coming over from the old country and nobly putting her should to the wheel in the new land and I have no doubt that our backstory is just as complicated. We’re not freedom fighters and we’re not craven liars. Just folks.
And I’m no hero either. I just want to throw my little spitball for justice. And these little moments – of victory, of humility, of recognition – are why I do what I do.