I have a question: why is it that same sex married immigrants are allowed to enter the US under its asylum rules, but polygamous groups consisting of one husband and two or more wives are not? Don’t the PC Cultists all put signs in the yards proclaiming “Love is love”? When it comes to polygamy, what happened to “but it’s just love”?
As an attorney who practiced immigration law for years and saw the industry from the inside out, I came to the realization that there is a vast entrenched economic interest in furthering immigration. This has come about in the past few years because the legal industry has WAY too many lawyers and the law schools are putting out more all the time. There are at least two millions lawyers in the US. There is a need for only about 100,000 lawyers nation-wide. The rest are not needed. In the past, lawyers had many sources of income, including writing wills, transferring real estate, and arguing business and criminal cases in court. Most lawyers do not, and never have argued in court, criminal lawyers being a small minority, and it’s mostly the larger law firms that handle the very complex issues involved in business disputes, not individual attorneys who are the majority of lawyers.
In recent times, meaning since the recession of 2007 plus, huge numbers of lawyers have become unemployed. The writing of wills has largely moved online for self-help. Transferring real estate now requires a separate additional license which few lawyers have, mineral rights are now handled by landmen, and virtually the entire real estate business is now performed by real estate brokers who often engage in the practice of law when filling out their forms, sans the assistance of any lawyer. As a result, those excess lawyers who did not graduate in the top 10% and get hired by the giant law firms — and 90% did not — have found fewer methods of earning legal fees. They can offer family and divorce law by taking ads in the back page of local papers. But a large number of lawyers have discovered that immigration law is a pleasant stress-free practice that almost never results in malpractice claims or prosecutions by the Bar.
Immigration law is very different from traditional law. The latter takes place in state courts or U.S. district courts where the lawyer is subject to expensive fines if he violates the code of ethics, which is easy to do, even indefinite jail time for civil misbehavior with no constitutional defense since that only applies to criminal offenses. The former takes place in federal immigration courts which are entirely separate from U.S. district courts. In immigration court there are no juries and the rules of evidence don’t apply and the judge has no authority to fine or jail the lawyer. If the immigration lawyer screws up and as a result his client is deported, the lawyer walks free and keeps his fees. There are no fines. Immigration practice is as close as law practice can come to medical practice. The emphasis, always unspoken of course, is on quantity not quality of service.
Payment is up front or by installment and is not typically done with an attorney “trust” bank account to hold retainer fees from which the lawyer pays himself as he performs his hourly services. Immigration lawyers charge per application, not by the hour. Immigration practice is so poorly supervised by State Bars that many so-called immigration lawyers are not lawyers at all but are never investigated or prosecuted by the State Bars, which almost exclusively prosecute whites who practiced after their licenses lapsed or other citizens whose command of English is perfect. It is not politically popular for Bars to investigate and prosecute “abogados” or “notarios”.
Thus there has developed recently a large and growing economic special interest of otherwise unemployable lawyers in furthering and growing the scale of immigration into the US. For many lawyers the ease of immigration practice is preferable to dangerous, high-stress divorce law or unemployment. Love has nothing to do with it. Paying off huge tuition loans to law schools as they crank out ever more crowds of indebted lawyers does.
As if this situation is not alarming enough, State Bars are now beginning to allow foreign lawyers to practice in the US without ever taking a single law course in any American law school. This rule was passed at the beginning of 2015 in Texas and other states are following suit. Technically, they are supposed to practice under the supervision of Americans who are licensed by Texas and are restricted to foreign lawyers who obtained their license from Common Law countries. But in actuality, “common law” is a flexible concept and can apply almost anywhere, and as this is written lawyers from a growing number of other countries are now practicing in American state courts with little or no supervision, and not only in immigration practice.
It is no longer necessary for a Mexican lawyer, for instance, to pass the Texas State Bar if he obtained his license in Mexico. If he is here legally, and it is relatively easy for a large law firm to make that happen, then he can practice in Texas state courts. FYI, Mexico does not require its law students to pass any Bar in order to practice. This trend is putting even more American lawyers out of work and steering them to immigration practice. State legislatures are largely helpless to halt this since the giant law firms are behind these policies and the giant law firms’ interests are global and they are more interested in expanding their influence by hiring people like the royal families of oil-rich emirates into their law firms than in remaining loyal to the US or to any other specific country. This too is part of the spread of the Cult of Wokeness.