IMMIGRATION LAWYER

Bernard Wolfsdorf, 33, has practiced law since 1978, first in his native South Africa, then in Boston and now in Los Angeles. For four years, he has worked exclusively in immigration law. His cases range from helping political refugees gain asylum to getting clients the proper documents to live and work in the United States. Wolfsdorf also handles amnesty cases, for which he generally charges $1,000 to $1,200, that stem from the immigration legislation passed by Congress last year. It provides amnesty for aliens who have lived in this country continuously since before Jan. 1, 1982. The following was taken from an interview with Wolfsdorf by Michele Lingre, a Van Nuys free-lance writer.

I practiced criminal law at one time, and I didn’t always get the feeling I was helping people or I didn’t feel good about helping all of them. I also practiced business law. I didn’t enjoy that, all I felt was I was doing was helping rich people get even richer.

The reason I decided to get into immigration law was my own case. I was granted political asylum in the United States based on my political activities and my fear of returning to South Africa. For a year, I had the anxieties a lot of my clients have. This is an area of law which seizes you up; you become personally, emotionally involved in a client’s case.

The clear winners on amnesty are going to be Mexicans and other Hispanic nationals. I don’t speak Spanish, so I don’t have a huge slice of that amnesty business. I get mainly the ones who speak English, and I have some cases where I use an interpreter.

There is a certain reward that one receives in handling an amnesty case: Here is someone who’s been living in a sort of shadow society, and you’re helping him come out. There is an enormous sense of relief that it’s coming to an end. And the quality of the people--basic, hard-working, honest, decent--that’s very rewarding. There’s also still a sense of disbelief on their part, “Can this be real?”

Some people are calling last year’s Immigration Reform and Control Act the “Immigration Attorney Full Employment Act.” Suddenly, everyone is jumping in the field, and you can’t become an expert overnight. In immigration, as in other areas, there’s the law that they teach at school and then there’s the way things are done.

There are a lot of grounds for excludability. You have to know the law and the problems in that area in order to start asking questions. If it’s an asylum case, you want to know about the family political background and political conditions. If there are things someone isn’t disclosing--it’s a sense you get over time--and I think they are relevant, I won’t take the case.

When I was still a rookie in Boston, I was about to file for citizenship for a very respectable businessman. He didn’t strike me as having skeletons in his closet. Then I said: “I just want to check. Have you ever been arrested?” He said, “Well, I was indicted for rape a year ago.” I now say to everyone: “Look, I want to hear the worst possible thing you can tell me about yourself, I don’t want to find out at the interview, you’d better tell me now.”

The most important thing is to make clients comfortable. A lot of clients are unduly concerned. I spend upward of 70% of my time providing moral, psychological support to my clients, about 10% of the time doing administrative work and 20% actually preparing the case.

I think every lawyer has a moral obligation to take certain cases on a non-remunerated basis. I volunteer to do that type of thing. I have a case right now, no one would believe it could happen in Los Angeles. I have an Angolan national, an officer with U.S.-backed UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) who fled Angola in January, 1986. This guy had been captured by enemy troops, imprisoned and tortured.

He eventually jumped ship, landed in Puerto Rico and applied for asylum. After six months nothing had happened, so he jumped another ship and landed in Long Beach. They (the Immigration and Naturalization Service) locked him up and forgot about him until February, ’87. Finally, somebody found the file, and you’d think they’d say: “We really goofed up, we should let this guy go.”

On the contrary, I went maybe 15 times down to immigration just to see the guy. They keep shifting him to different prisons. I can’t even find him. I’ve submitted at least four statements requesting him to be released. He’s still in jail. His final hearing is July 7. The only thing I could do was go into district court and challenge the entire policy that the present government has of detaining people.

I have to balance maintaining a high-quality law practice and the fact that this is also a business, and I am not really trained as a businessman. You also have to be concerned with marketing, preparing newsletters, sending out announcements to other lawyers, going to speaking engagements. The most important and time-consuming thing is to keep up to date. This area of law seems to change by the day or the week, and it requires at least one or two hours of reading a day.