Day 38: Cultural Competency, an Example and a Struggle

Photo by Wim van 't Einde on Unsplash

I spent the morning preparing for two days of orientation next week for the Immigration Law Clinic.

“Orientation” is a super boring word, but if you scrape off the varnish there’s actually a lot going on there. (Kind of like “academic transformation” - but meh, enough said about that. We can all read the news.)

“Orientation” in a law clinic (or any setting, really), is more than just standards and procedures. It’s more than a password and a door key and an office tour.

Orientation = Relationship

It’s a chance to set a tone for relationships - faculty-to-student, student-to-student, and student-to-client. Tons of research shows that socially connected workers are typically happier, and happier workers are typically more productive. So emphasizing that as a value is one of the top goals for Immigration Law Clinic orientation.

That’s why we’ll start with music that reflects our clients’ home countries. And then some ice breaker exercises that model the values of interaction, flexibility, pivoting, and relationship-building.

And there will be time - not just as an afterthought but built into the heart of the orientation - for hanging out, having fun, getting to know each other outside a formal work setting.

relationship = Cultural Competency

One of the key things students get to learn in the Immigration Law Clinic is “cultural competency” - the ability to relate to persons whose contexts and experiences may be very different from our own. Cultural competency is necessary even when your clients are from the same hometown as you, because their experiences will still differ from yours in important ways.

When your client is from another country, however, the need for cultural competency is pronounced (which is both a hindrance and a help).

For legal advocates, cultural competency is critically important, because our students will, in an important way, serve as the “voice” of our clients before the immigration agencies and courts. Interrogating how we relate to our clients, and what kind of narrators we will be of their stories, is one of the biggest responsibilities -and most valuable opportunities - we have.

My Struggle today

As I was preparing for next week’s session, I struggled with a cultural competency issue myself. On Tuesday morning, we will split into small groups and introduce the student teams to the cases they will be working on. Since immigration cases take years to complete, these are all clients who have been with our clinic for a while. We know them and care about them.

I’m eager to help our students put names with faces, to realize right away that they will be working for and relating with real people. Because a manila folder with a name and number on it can seem so impersonal, part of me would love to be able to show the students a photo of the clients they will soon be calling to introduce themselves.

We have plenty of photos in the files, as immigration agencies almost always require updated photos and photo IDs with every application. Sometimes applications will also include family photos to illustrate relationships that may form the basis of some applications.

But as I downloaded the first photo and pasted it into a PowerPoint, something in me was revulsed. This is a photo of a person, my gut said, that has already been reduced by the immigration agency to a passport photo and a nine-digit number. Pulling out that photo and putting it on a screen, I felt, didn’t humanize the client for the student. Instead, it seemed dehumanizing, institutionalizing - like a mug shot.

Balancing Student Learning and Client Needs

In this case, I felt like the right balance was to abandon the effort. The risk of adding insult to the injury our clients already face in a broken immigration system was too great. The students will meet the clients soon enough - and can review photos in the file on their own if it helps them to put a face with the name before they call.

In the immigration clinic, there’s always a delicate balancing act. The clinic exists for student learning, but the learning experience is available only because our clients are real people with real legal needs.

There isn’t always an arrow pointing to the right place to strike the balance between those two needs. But by keeping relationships and cultural competency central in our thinking, we can continually interrogate the choices we make as legal advocates. Those lessons may be palpable in an immigration context, but they are translatable to any context in which our students may eventually work.

My hope is that their first day “on the job” as a lawyer will set the tone for consciousness around these decisions throughout their careers.