Culture Shock

My first week at Advancing Justice-Atlanta went very well by all metrics. By Saturday I had memorized the exact drive to the office to the point of making the commute in the span of 6 minutes, traffic allowing. In the evenings I'd take the time to pick a direction and drive as far as I could to get a better sense of my surroundings. I met about half of our 40 person team in my first few days and found everyone to be incredibly welcoming and pleasant. In fact, that sort of beckoning kindness floated through the wider metro area like a heavy cloud hanging low in the humid summer air. It was comforting, reminding me of when I first moved to Virginia and just how quickly it felt like the smiles and sweet words became part of the scenery. It was not reserved to any one area or people, but distributed across the whole tapestry of communities that made up the idea of Atlanta in unique but omnipresent ways.

Dear reader, here I must admit my lack of experience in the field for which I had been contracted. Until this point my only real interactions with the field of immigration law and asylum were lived experiences, as a person whose very existence was dependent on the aforementioned legal scheme. Had it not been for Cold War era immigration policies my parents would never have met and I would not be in Georgia reviewing case files and country conditions trying to string together the base legal arguments for our clients. I came here to learn, and I was prepared to have a rocky start or to be culture shocked before I got adjusted. While things started really smoothly, I was right to expect a culture shock, I just wasn't aware it would be a matter of office culture as much as societal culture.

I think there is an unfortunate picture of the average non-profit worker in the image of most law students, one of an overworked, underpaid, and almost naive individual, fighting ad infinitum against forces greater than them with no end in sight. I was perfectly content to live up to that image over the course of my work interning here at AAAJ. For me, honorable work has always been worth the personal cost, because that's what citizen lawyers are for, picking up a shovel when there's work to do and not expecting more in return than the community you've left behind better after your work. This was not what the members of the legal departments at Advancing Justice-Atlanta were like at all.

Please don't misunderstand, these are incredibly capable and hard-working individuals, fighting to offer legal services or litigate novel issues on behalf of those who need it most. Yet, they had an intense care for not just their community, but for themselves and each other as well. This was far and away the most supportive workplace I'd ever been in. The summer season was slow for the whole office, so in office days were largely reduced to Tuesday and Thursday unless otherwise necessary while the rest of the week was purely digital. Caseloads were taken on in accordance with everyone's individual capacity, and everyone had access to facilities and resources to help them emotionally or psychologically if the work ever became too much. Lunch was provided every Tuesday and Thursday, and Fridays each week were a half day starting in June. I came in wracked with not a little bit of nerves and uncertainty, thinking I would drop the ball somewhere along the way and seem less like more trouble than I was worth here. Instead I found a group of strong and measured professionals, never expecting more from themselves or others than they could give. They were stressed, certainly, but stressed because they cared about their clients and their cases, things they had nurtured for months or years, people they had met personally. I realized that each employee here was not just a member of a team, but also an investment, one that was treated gracefully to produce better results for those relying on them. It was really heartwarming to notice.

More heartwarming still was the diversity of our office. While I expected some amount of diversity from an organization named Asian Americans Advancing Justice, I was truly blown away by what would come to be my home base for the next ten weeks. People from all walks of life, faiths, sexes, genders, and convictions filled the complex that made our offices, all contributing their unique skills and perspectives to our shared goals of engaging with and assisting underrepresented communities of all stripes. Here I must mention my supervising attorney, who was at all times incredibly patient and kind with me as I adjusted to our new normal. She is, by all accounts, everything an attorney ought to be: well versed in her craft, passionate about her cases, and wise in a way that only comes from the experience she's lived in this career. Serene, if you ever get to read this, I must truly thank you for all you're going to teach me, I'm really fortunate to have you as a mentor. 

I could tell our office was something special by the way our clients interacted with us too, thus the second bout of culture shock hit me. Immigration work has always felt like a thoroughly depressing field because of how attitudes towards immigration here in the US seem to affect it and how little oversight immigration court decisions are subject to. My brief introduction to the greater workings of the system before our first client meeting seemed to cement some of that negativity in my mind. The discretion afforded to immigration judges was great, and only subject to review if there was severe error involved. Still, there was good reason to keep fighting. Armed with that knowledge, I was prepared to enter into my first set of client meetings with an eye on calming some anxious sentiments. Yet, I was met by smiling faces. People were put at ease by our presence. Some had been working through the system so long that this was just another day for them, others were desperate, certainly, but hadn't given up hope, and saw us for what we were, guiding hands happy to give them what we could and change their status, prepare their applications, and advocate on their behalf's at no cost to them. My supervising attorney even got invited to the wedding of two of our clients, for how appreciative they were for her services. 

Across languages- Arabic, Spanish, Haitian Creole, Pashto, etc.- I felt the same warm embrace that I felt when I got here, like I was being kindly welcomed into someone's shared struggle, into their ambitions, into their suffering. There were some hard moments, asylum, after all, requires an inability to return to one's home. Some of the stories I heard were intense. All the same, though, the hope that propelled these people to this country, to this organization, remained. It felt like no matter how hard it may be to fight and win a case, even if the best legal argument in the world wouldn't convince the the court we stood before, there was still a reason to fight, to argue, to yell, to rage, because these calm and often resigned smiles deserved some fire willing to propel them forward. It felt right to be here.

As I walked around Piedmont park on Saturday morning, a particularly gorgeous stretch of the Belt Line recommended to me by some friends in the office, I reflected on the beauty of the trees and flowers that surrounded me. So often in my experience was the South seen as a lost cause, as was immigration, or non-profit work. Yet, here I was, here we were, persisting in spite of it all. In some ways thriving. Doing good work here, addressing these communities and this diversity that so often goes ignored in the wider cultural consciousness, meant winning a necessary (if small) victory in the greater discussion what this place we had all fled to would look like in five, twenty, or even fifty years. I looked at the young trees fighting for an inch of sunshine among their older progenitors, growing despite soil that may look overfull, and light that may seem scarce, and it all felt right.