In Immigration Law Clinic this semester, we decided to have two “Book Group” days. I nominated several books by immigrant writers or about the immigrant experience, and the students voted on which two we’d read. Today we discussed the top vote-getter, and the only work of fiction on the list: The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid.

In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a Pakistani narrator named Changez tells an unnamed American about Changez’s life in the United States, from his graduation from Princeton to his work at an elite New York consulting firm in 2001. Changez experiences discrimination in a country reeling from a terrorist attack, but his recollections focus primarily on his doomed relationship with a Princton classmate, Erica, who has retreated into a world of isolation out of grief over the death of her first love, Chris.

Changez’s focus on his intimate struggles, we felt, raises questions about whether his rapid disillusionment, return to Pakistan, and possible fundamentalism — suggested but denied by Changez — reflects his experiences with the country or his experiences with the woman. The book leaves both Changez’s and his American companion’s motives unclear. Each suspects each other, denies his own intention for violence. Both possibilities, on both sides, seem equally plausible.

Immigration and National Security

Only after we’d finished our disucssion today did I realize that I’d unconsciously nominated a book that isn’t about immigation. True, Changez does spend time in the U.S. on temporary visas (educational and work), but he doesn’t immigrate; he’s living and teaching in Pakistan when we meet him. The book raises issues primarily of global politics and national security, not immigration.

But maybe that’s fitting. Yesterday, I had the pleasure to speak to the immigration section of the National Lawyers Guild in Los Angeles about my book, The Accidental History of the U.S. Immigration Courts. As I discovered while researching the book, the immigration court system that we all work within is not really a “court” system but a law enforcement agency, set up during perhaps the two greatest national security crises of the past century: World War II and 9/11.

On the eve of World War II, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels spread the rumor that a “fifth column” of Nazi spies lurked within all Allied nations, ready to lower the drawbridge as the Nazis attacked. Though the story was mostly false, the State Department believed it. Roosevelt hastily moved the immigration services from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice to partner with the FBI in catching and removing supposed sabotage agents.

All immigration services remained in DOJ until after 9/11, when the Bush Administration’s version of the Homeland Security Act proposed to move them to the new Department of Homeland Security, for similar reasons as FDR’s. In the end, the investigation and prosecution functions did move, but Senator Sam Brownback, ranking member of the Senate Immigration Subcommittee, held out to resist the movement of the immigration courts along with the them. Immigration courts remained — and still remain — in DOJ.

Immigration, not Crime

DOJ attorneys in 1940 warned FDR not to move immigration services to DOJ, a law enforcement agency. A departmental memo stated, “[t]o transfer the immigration service [to DOJ] might well create in the public mind a confusion between immigration matters and criminal matters. Such a result would be unfortunate.”

Eighty-four years later, so pervasive is the confusion that even I fell for it when nominating titles for our Immigration Law Clinic book group.