‘It is work worth doing, but it is damn hard’

Connectez-vous pour écouter l'article

It is so damn hard being a racialized practitioner of Canadian immigration, refugee and citizenship law.

I posted those words on LinkedIn after a call with one of my closest colleagues and mentors, herself a racialized woman practitioner. After years of driving some of the most important conversations, ranging from the use of automation in immigration law to providing policy advice/commentary to Courts, tribunals, and media, we both wondered why we still felt sidelined. 

I do not know if I was seeking catharsis or commiseration, but what came back was a strange mix of empathy and repressed energy. It was as if the comment box was the only "safe-ish" space left to say it out loud. 

So let me say the thing the comment box does not usually let us say plainly: this is not a personal problem that racialized practitioners need better coping strategies for. It is a structural one that the profession has quietly left us to carry, largely and unfortunately, alone.

This is not the first time I have used a platform to explore how to practice law as a racialized practitioner. Seven years ago, two racialized colleagues and I wrote about the importance of understanding intersectional story-telling as framing our legal journies and narratives, in a publication funded by our own practice fees. In an act of subtle protest,  we were tired of the same faces filling the same pages about a legal experience we did not share. Reading it back, I still ask myself: What was I thinking?  And has anything changed?

Some things have. Some have not. Race sits at every corner of immigration practice, whether it’s the detention of Black and brown migrants, discriminatory travel policies before and after COVID, internal reports of racism inside Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and now, facial recognition and automated tools that carry their own biases forward. 

It is worth remembering that Canadian immigration law was built on a colour bar, and it still uses "status" as a cover for racial hierarchy. I have written before about the silence around race in this field. While some of the silence is breaking through it’s neoliberal phase, some of it is being actively rebuilt, as think tanks and pundits push back against DEI work and simultaneously force practitioners like me back into intellectual and participatory retreat.

Here is the part I think the larger bar and legal community needs to sit with. I am writing from the immigration practice perspective, but I suspect this falls within your area of law as well. In your boardrooms, client meetings, and court appearances you may be experiencing the same thing.

It is a myth, and certainly not my experience, that a racialized lawyer can decompartmentalize the work from their own juxtaposed roots. I am the child of immigrants. Most of my team have lived the immigration journey themselves or been intimately affected by it. 

Within the Canadian immigration bar, I see more racialized practitioners thriving than ever. However, I also see who is still doing the large volume of legal aid work without support and who is disproportionately caught in disciplinary and regulatory trouble. 

Add gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and immigration status into the mix, and the layers and mental health struggles that this practice can lay on racialized practitioners multiply.

That is not a coincidence of individual resilience. It is a troubling pattern, and patterns that put the legal community at risk are exactly what the bar's professional regulatory mandate exists to study, not something for us to manage or whisper about quietly or share only with our insurers and own counsel when things go sideways.

That pattern is easy to name in the abstract. It is harder to name what it costs to us day-to-day and what the others and those outside the legal community rarely sees. These are the parts that rarely get said aloud: the self-censorship, the fight for a seat at the table, the exhausting work of being the cultural go-between for clients.

But staying quiet about this would mean forgetting what got me here and writing in the first place. The times I was mistaken for the interpreter or a client’s family member. The times I would freeze up, ignore, or worse, play along uncomfortably after hearing something racist come from a person with a position of power. 

Even now, signing my legal submissions and forms, I second-guess which version of my name to use and what it signals.

None of that makes me the hardest-hit case in the system I am describing. If anything, I have had more shelter and protection than most. I am lucky, privileged, resourced, and championed. 

It is also here that I should acknowledge a difficult paradox: I have, at times, benefited from my own racialization in ways I am not entirely comfortable with. Clients have seen themselves in me, someone who could speak to them in their own language and whose experiences I could translate, or at least receive level-eyed. 

I have also watched the opposite happen to colleagues: the same clients (or colleagues)looking down, distrustful, negotiating, treating us as personal assistants. I have seen tears be shed, and mental health be tested, because for us, doing this work and living it are rarely separable.

So what should change? I can only speak to what has worked for me, and to be clear, these are survival tactics, not a substitute for the profession doing its part. They may sounds like the very “coping strategies” I state are not enough, but in a sense, they have become a necessary starting point for building solidarity and movement.

First, I try to stay grounded in time. Before law, I was infatuated with Canadian migration history, and I remind myself that our exclusion is not history but living memory, just one generation removed. 

I think often of Douglas Jung: a man who was born in and fought for a country that offered him no guarantee of citizenship. He was called to the bar in B.C. in 1954 and immediately chose to build an immigration practice. The first of us to practice law did so specifically to help his own people move through borders that had only just stopped keeping them out.

I also surround myself with people who understand our shared trials and tribulations. These are the mentors and mentees, with whom I cherish the camaraderie of phone calls and the remote teas. Most of our calls start, as they do in our culture, talking about family and food before we get to work. I take that neighbourhood principle to our own work. When our firm hires, we think seriously about lived experience, cultural competency, and language, not as a diversity checkbox but as the right hire, full stop. When we choose to work with clients, we accept those who share our values and buy into our approach to shared inclusion. 

Finally, I try to remember that holding the stories of migrant communities is itself a privilege. Through my clients, I have travelled further than my own passport ever could. I carry those conversations into the rest of my life. Much like at a first consultation, many of my greatest conversations start with asking someone where they come from and what matters to them and their family.

But firms and individual practitioners doing this alone are not enough. If law societies can track disciplinary outcomes, they can also track who is left to do unsupported legal aid work and ask why. 

If the Canadian Bar Association can build a section for nearly every practice area, it can build real mentorship infrastructure that centres on the racialized experience. Currently, racialized lawyers are left to absorb that labour on evenings and weekends informally, or under-resourced and too-often segregated affinity groups are left to do it alone. I hear from someone new almost every week, looking for exactly that kind of mentorship, informally, because the formal version does not yet exist and is not being championed.

None of this requires anyone to feel guilty. It requires the profession to treat this the way it treats any other systemic risk: as something to be measured, resourced, and fixed, not merely as something to ask us to be more resilient about.

Twelve years into my practice, immigration (and racial justice work more broadly) is work worth doing, but it is still so damn hard. The question this profession has not yet answered is why so much of that difficulty has been left for us to carry alone.

* Views expressed are not necessarily those of the Canadian Bar Association