While I was working as an accredited representative at an immigration law nonprofit, Sofía, just barely 18 years old, made an appointment. She was about to graduate as valedictorian from my old high school and attend a prestigious university pre-med. Yet she was undocumented, and had many questions about her future. Could she still attend medical school given her status? Was there any way for her to practice medicine as a doctor? Or would she be stuck working under the table at a restaurant like she was doing now, even once she earned a college degree? 100,000 young people in the United States each year are in the same predicament as Sofía: graduating from high school without the work authorization necessary to pursue their professional goals. Through hundreds of conversations with undocumented immigrants, first over three years as a legal caseworker and later over three years as a Ph.D. student at Harvard, I have learned how devastating it can be for my clients and research participants to have their career dreams on indefinite hold. Yet I have also learned that, unlike what many believe, these young people are not entirely limited to under-the-table work in industries willing to skirt employment laws. They can lawfully earn income through entrepreneurship, such as by working as independent contractors, starting C-Corps or LLCs, and founding or joining worker cooperatives, all without work authorization. Moreover, at least twelve states do not require a Social Security Number for professional licenses. Sofía would not be able to complete a medical residency to become a doctor, but she would, for example, be able to graduate from nursing or physician’s assistant school and pursue contracts as a traveling practitioner. Through over 50 interviews with undocumented professionals across the country, I have shown through my Ph.D. research how a variety of such lucrative, dignified, fulfilling entrepreneurial careers are indeed achievable for this population. Yet over my years doing this work, I have met many immigration and employment attorneys who are unaware of these pathways. Immigration attorneys are trained to do legalization screenings, but too often these screenings yield no legalization options. Then what? Immigration attorneys are rarely informed about how their clients might pursue their goals even if they do not qualify to adjust their status. Similarly, employment attorneys assist undocumented immigrants who have experienced labor exploitation, advising them of their rights and complaints they can make. Yet they rarely tell their clients that alternatives exist to under-the-table employment, making it likely that they will experience similar abuse again. This is the social justice issue that has motivated me to pursue my J.D. at Harvard Law School. To truly address undocumented labor exploitation and stalled dreams, employment and immigration attorneys must move beyond defending clients after harm is done and telling them to watch the news for immigration law changes. They must begin proactively advising immigrants about ways they can pursue their dreams and provide for their families in a more dignified way, and provide accessible legal guidance on how to do so. Upon completing the joint JD/PhD, my dream is to utilize my and others’ research on undocumented entrepreneurship to inform a university clinic at the intersection of immigration and employment law, and to serve as a clinical professor at such a clinic. This would allow me to bring immigration and employment lawyers together to support undocumented immigrants like Sofía in building their desired careers, even within the constraints imposed by current laws.

*Harvard Law School admissions essay: What motivates you to pursue law? Please share how your experiences, background, and/or interests have shaped you and will shape your engagement in the HLS community and the legal profession.* In my legal work and research with undocumented communities, I am often asked whether I am “personally impacted.” I know what they mean: have I too felt the fear and uncertainty of being undocumented? No, I rush to make clear: my family immigration history goes back to Russian Jews fleeing pogroms a century ago. Underneath this question is usually another: How, then, have I come to dedicate my career to immigration advocacy? This is when I reach for the professional story. It has its roots at Williams College, where I chaired a refugee advocacy student group, tutored newcomer high school students, and learned from migrant rights organizations through a travel course to the Guatemalan-Mexican border. My self-designed contract major in critical theory culminated in a senior honors thesis on “localist” migrant farmwork, where I argued that labor law protection carveouts for the smallest U.S. businesses render farmworkers most vulnerable on the very local farms assumed to be the most ethical. After graduation, I was hired at the only DOJ-recognized nonprofit in the region. I trained in immigration law and passed the exam to become a DOJ accredited representative (8 CFR § 1292), who could legally represent clients in front of USCIS. Over the next three years, I saw nearly one thousand clients, represented hundreds on family-based cases, and partnered with attorneys to prepare asylum applications. Now as an Education Ph.D. student at Harvard, I have engaged with immigration in new ways: presenting my research at the Law and Society conference, leading professional development workshops on undocumented career pathways for educators, and joining a MA Department of Higher Education working group on state-based financial aid implementation. In this narrative, the pieces add up neatly. Yet there is a withholding involved in this neat narrative. It is not as if I read every DACA court case opinion in full, or subscribe to an ICE watch network everywhere I travel, or focus my research on undocumented career pathways out of mere academic interest. The fear and uncertainty are familiar in that they impact some of the people I love most, including my partner of five years. This personal story is one I tell much less often. It involves signing my partner’s power of attorney form before his DACA advance parole trip, so I could sort out his finances if he were stuck abroad. It involves flattening our lives and our love into a meticulously organized stack of papers—train tickets, letters, photos—in preparation for our own adjustment of status application. It involves fearing for his family member’s safety after his truck windshield was smashed with impunity by an employer, who was furious at his refusal to show up for work despite weeks of missing paychecks. It is these day-to-day realities, as much as my professional experience, that have motivated me to pursue a legal career through Harvard Law School. I would enter law school not just as a scholar furthering my own career, but as an individual straining both to protect those I love and to help them achieve their own dreams despite the barriers. After my time as an accredited representative, I left disillusioned with legal remedies. My caseworker colleague and I had seen over 800 clients per year between the two of us, yet the majority of our clients lacked any avenue to adjust their status. I therefore entered the Harvard Education PhD determined to document how immigrants in precarious statuses could achieve their goals within the constraints imposed by immigration law. But this research has pulled me back toward the law in ways I did not expect. It has shown me the value of historical legal research, which would enable me to track how laws have rendered illegality more consequential over time. It has made me interested in the intersections of labor law with immigration law, which would teach me which income-generation pathways are fully legal for undocumented immigrants and which could present greater risks for already precarious individuals. Finally, it has made me determined to put my research into practice through policy advocacy and impact litigation: not only helping clients navigate existing systems, as I did previously, but utilizing legal tools to change those systems. I am therefore applying to the Coordinated JD/PhD program in search of training and mentorship to develop as an immigration legal scholar and as an aspiring practicing attorney. My research sits at the intersection of immigration and employment, and I have become fascinated by the innovative work being done through clinical programs at this emerging intersection, such as Cornell’s Path2Papers and Yale’s Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic. I hope to learn from the excellent professors, such as Sabi Ardalan and Patricia Alejandro, in Harvard’s clinics, including the Immigration and Refugee Clinic, the Employment Law Externship Clinic, and the Transactional Law Clinics’ Community Enterprise Project. In doing so, I would devote time to determining what the unmet needs at this intersection might be, using my research skills to be precise about how a new clinical program might fill those needs. In particular, I would love to consider how my and others’ research on non-employment-based opportunities might inform a new legal clinic at this intersection. After completing the coordinated program, I would love the opportunity to create and run such a program as a clinical professor, though I would also be fulfilled in other pathways such as an attorney position at a related nonprofit or a traditional law professorship in these specialties. Any of these pathways would ensure that my research would not remain behind paywalls, but could be used to better immigrants’ lives within and beyond existing constraints.

I have spent the past decade focused on helping individuals navigate unjust immigration systems. During my undergraduate years at Williams College, I designed my own major in critical theory and wrote a senior honors thesis on labor law protection carveouts for migrant farmworkers. I spent the next three years, newly out of college, as a Department-of-Justice-accredited immigration legal caseworker at a Massachusetts nonprofit, representing hundreds of clients on family-based cases. During these last three years, I have pursued my PhD at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, researching how undocumented young people can achieve professional careers through entrepreneurial pathways. In working toward my dissertation, I have interviewed over 50 undocumented professionals—lawyers, social workers, nurses, consultants—who have managed to achieve career success despite current laws. In each of these stages, I have been determined to ascertain how immigrants in precarious statuses could achieve their goals within the existing system. The problem, of course, was that the existing system was simply not navigable for many, and life seemed intent on showing me the utter inadequacy of my approach. The majority of my clients lacked any avenue to adjust their status, and the few who did qualify struggled under the stress and prolonged uncertainty of these processes. My very first interviewee wrote to me months later from Mexico City, sharing that he had been deported from California—and that no amount of entrepreneurial success had been able to provide him security. An undocumented loved one’s truck windshield was smashed by an employer, furious at his refusal to show up for work despite weeks of missing paychecks—and no amount of Know Your Rights information could convince him that the law could truly protect him if he filed a report. I, frankly, had had enough with the current system. I was beginning to realize, moreover, that the triage nonprofit model in which I had worked did not represent the full potential of the law. I was seeing an attorney colleague convince the outgoing Biden administration to make employment-based sponsorship newly feasible for undocumented college graduates. I was watching MALDEF defend the DACA program and successfully argue that the case should be limited to one state. As I prepared briefings on the DACA litigation to college campuses and edited employment-based sponsorship legal briefs for Bender’s Immigration Bulletin, I was recognizing the power of strategic legal advocacy to create new opportunities for entire classes of impacted individuals. I wanted in. Now, as I enter Harvard Law School, I am determined to put my research into practice through policy advocacy and impact litigation—returning to the practice of law, but with a more strategic vision. I now see it as the duty of immigration legal practitioners to not just help individuals navigate existing systems, but to use all the legal tools available to change those systems. Despite new federal loan caps that limit public interest loan forgiveness to half of Harvard’s annual law school tuition, I remain entirely committed to public interest immigration work. My dream would be to utilize my and others’ research on non-employment-based opportunities to inform a university clinic at the intersection of immigration and employment law, and to either serve as a clinical professor at such a clinic or work at an aligned nonprofit. Although I have become much more practical in my research and advocacy work, I still draw on my critical theory roots to envision social transformation. As an immigration attorney, I would hope to work with others to build, however slowly and unevenly, toward such a future where immigration status is not a barrier to achieving one’s dreams.