Marc: Hey everyone, Marc Luber here.
Today on JD Careers Out There we’re looking at what it’s like to be an immigration lawyer,
so stick around.
[theme song] Alright, as you may already know, at JDCOT we explore career paths both in and
out of law to help you find a career that fits you and help you succeed using your law
degree.
Today’s guest is Christina Lee.
She’s an immigration lawyer in San Francisco and one of the founding partners of immigration
boutique Becker and Lee.
Christina cofounded this firm after working in all areas of immigration law at three different
immigration firms.
She’s got a lot of great stuff to share with us today, so let’s meet Christina.
Christina, welcome to the show!
Christina: Hi Marc, thanks for having me.
Marc: Definitely.
Thank you for being here.
Christina, we’re excited to learn all about the Immigration Law practice, so we’re going
to be asking you questions about a typical day, who fits this path best, how to break
in and how to succeed!
So let’s start with this.
Tell us about your practice and what you do as an Immigration Lawyer.
Christina: I have a firm that I just started with a partner in January and we have a few
associates that work for us and a few staff members.
We practice all areas of Immigration Law, which includes family-based and removal defense
and employment-based immigration.
However, employment-based is sort of its own world, so for this session I’m going to
just focus on the family and removal-side of immigration.
Marc: Well, that’s great.
You know what - I’ll let the audience know right now that we’re going to have a different
guest speak about the Employment Immigration Law and we’ll have a separate video on that.
So, go ahead and tell us about what you do.
Christian: So, to focus on the family-removal side, basically for family-based immigration,
it involves a lot of family members petitioning other family members, either through marriage
or parents petitioning children or children petitioning their parents, either for those
immigrants who are here in the US or if they’re outside the country and they would counselor
process in.
The removal part is the litigation part of immigration Law.
So, for those who like to go to court and argue and talk to judges, removal defense
is the place to be.
For removal defense, we go to court, and Immigration is trying to deport our clients, either because
they’ve been here undocumented or ran out of status or they might have committed some
crimes.
So essentially, removal defense is just asking the court through legal avenues to try and
keep our clients here.
Marc: Interesting.
OK, so let’s start breaking this down further.
What would you say your main mission is as an Immigration Lawyer?
Is it basically helping people who are not from America to stay in America?
Christina: Yes.
Essentially for family-based and removal defense, yes.
It’s basically, our purpose is to allow people to either come here or stay here.
Most of our clients, for a removal defense, are people who’ve been here many, many years
- either, you know, average, probably 20 plus years.
They’ve been undocumented and they have - their whole family is here; their children,
grandchildren and there’s also other clients who don’t have those facts as well but our
main mission in immigration Law is to allow people to stay here in the United States.
Marc: Alright, interesting stuff, right?!
If you guys are watching on YouTube and this was helpful, please give us the thumbs up.
And if you want to see the full interview with Christina, come on over to JDCOT.com.
I’ll throw a link right up there.
You’re gonna hear lots more from Christina about what it’s like to work in immigration
law, how to break in and how to succeed.
If you’re already at the site, you can just scroll down to the full video.
Make sure you join our membership – that way you get access to all the helpful video
content and the transcripts.
Thanks again for watching everybody.
I’m Marc Luber and I’ll see you soon.