A Land of Opportunity

German A. Rodriguez and his wife have a running joke about his American origin story. It stems from the episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy writes a play about the arrival of her husband, Cuban musician Ricky Ricardo.

“She’s like, ‘He clutched his little threadbare knapsack as his leaky cattle boat steamed into New York Harbor,’ and Ricky is like, ‘What are you talking about?! I came in on a beautiful ship with 40 other musicians and all our instruments,’” says Rodriguez, who arrived in Maryland from Argentina in 2001. “We always laugh about that, because I don’t have this idealized, heroic border-crossing story. I arrived comfortably on a 747.”

Such is the beauty of the American story—there are many ways it can be written. But for these four attorneys, it all ends the same: freedom.

Origin Stories

Kiyanoush Razaghi, Law Office of Kiyanoush Razaghi; Immigration; Rockville; Iran: I had a successful practice in Iran. But because it’s a religious dictatorship government, attorneys don’t dare to represent the people who are systematically marginalized religious minorities. But I did, and the government didn’t like it. Many bad things happened, and I had to leave.

German A. Rodriguez, Armstrong Donohue Ceppos Vaughan & Rhoades; Personal Injury – Medical Malpractice: Defense; Rockville; Argentina: I came to the U.S. as an ESL student for one year in Hagerstown after I graduated high school in Argentina [in 2001]. It was meant to be a one-year stay before medical school. During that year, probably the second-worst financial crisis hit Argentina, and my parents ended up leaving. The longer I was here, the more opportunity I saw, so I made the decision that I wasn’t going back.

Soutry Smith, Hassani, Focas & Fifer; Estate Planning & Probate; Towson; India: I had some extended family here already. I was 10, so I had no say, but the move was largely for my parents to seek better opportunities for themselves and for me.

Isabelle Raquin, RaquinMercer; Criminal Defense; Rockville; France: The first time I came here was in 2006. I was 19 and an exchange student in Florida. I was already a law student in France; we can start when we are 18. So after I graduated from law school in Paris, I returned to America and got an LLM from Duke University in 2010. I hear all the time, “Why would you leave Paris for Rockville, Maryland?” But when I was at Duke, I interned with the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project. It was anti death penalty work, and I got really into it. Most of the attorneys were former public defenders, and that’s not an agency that exists in France. We have individual attorneys doing pro bono cases, but there’s no organization that shares the values and training, and offers a place to be surrounded with other lawyers who believe in the same fight. After law school, I applied to the public defender’s office in Montgomery County, and I got an internship and then got hired. That’s why I stayed.

First Impressions

Smith: We got here soon after 9/11, and I remember the whole move being fast. My parents had been thinking of getting visas up until the attacks, and when that happened, my parents were kind of like, “There’s no way we’re getting visas now.” But then we did, and it was go, go, go. I could speak English, but heavily accented. I was skinny, short, nerdy, and had to get thick glasses, so I wasn’t really in with all the popular kids when I started American school. School is where the culture shock really began.

Raquin: When I first arrived at the University of Florida, I was shocked to realize it was such a party town.

Razaghi: I went to check out at a grocery store and when the cashier saw me, she smiled, greeted me, and asked, “How are you doing?” That’s not how cashiers treat customers in Iran. It was weird. Why is she so kind? Does she want a tip? I tried to be very, very serious. I didn’t smile and kept my distance. This experience happened again and again. People were nice just walking the streets. When I made eye contact with people, they smiled, and I was offended for the first few times—“Why are these people laughing at me? Is there anything funny with me?” Later I found out that that’s how things work.

Rodriguez: It was a huge blizzard. I had seen snow before, but I have never lived anywhere where you’d walk out of your door and there’s two feet. I ended up in a small boarding academy in Hagerstown. It was your all-American small town. But what I really felt most, and I’m probably over-lawyering the answer, and you could define it with an amalgam of clichés, but the word that keeps coming up is freedom. Nowadays, that’s a complicated word. But that’s what I remember feeling.

Early Challenges

Razaghi: I left everything behind, including my wife and my 3-year-old son. I came having no expertise in American law, having limited English skills. I was 30 years old. People were telling me, “You’re too old and your English is not good. It would be a waste of your time and money to try to be a lawyer again.” Despite that, I got into the University of Baltimore School of Law. I didn’t have any grant or scholarship, and I had limited money. The regime was contacting my wife all the time, asking where I was. It was a very difficult time. But I passed the Bar in 2015 on my first attempt.

Smith: I arrived in November 2001 and didn’t go to school until 2002, when I started sixth grade. I’m an only child and came with my parents, but my parents soon separated, and my father went back to India. Suddenly, my mother was single and in nursing school, working nights and weekends. I didn’t have a lot of friends, and what I most remember is being alone. My mother was always mentally and emotionally there, but not physically. I just started going to the library and reading a lot. My mother continues to be such a big influence in my life because of this sacrifice—no friends, no time for her. And it was all for me. To this day, she tells me she had no idea if what she did was the right thing, but it was the only thing.

Raquin: I found my husband early on, so I always had his support. But the people who truly became my support system were my fellow public defenders. We were a group of 25-year-old attorneys all starting together, making our own decisions very early on. We got training, but you are completely independent and in charge of the decision-making process and the advice to your client. As a result, you have to find people you can trust, that you can really discuss challenges and struggles with. Those connections were so meaningful to me.

Rodriguez: The truth is I never really struggled with assimilation. Outside of a couple of barriers to understand technical terms in English, I always felt very much at home. It was like I was supposed to be here.

As a teenager trying to mold who I was, in many ways I think I was looking to leave Argentina because, philosophically, I didn’t see myself aligned with a lot of the shortcomings that I saw. I was born in 1983, within the first couple of months of the return to democracy. By the time I was a teenager, we had already gone through a political crisis and a couple of economic crises. You grew up with the sense that you were coming up in a world that was, in many fundamental ways, broken. I think that’s part of the reason why the gestalt of freedom made an impact on me, and why I felt at home here.

Finding a Foothold

Raquin: Coincidentally, my mom was visiting from France when I had my first jury trial, so she was able to see it, and I think it was a real surprise that I was doing what we see on TV. To me it seemed natural, because that’s what I was working my way to handling on my own. I was also very proud when I started to have my first murder cases, because that’s really reaching the top of the type of cases you can handle. It’s amazing to say, “I can handle a murder case on my own, and yes, I do it with a French accent.”

Smith: The day I got my first offer letter for a lawyer job, I’ll never forget the look in my mother’s eyes. I was obviously very proud of myself, too, but for me, the thing that I think about on a daily basis is my daughter—born in this country, who goes to a daycare I trust, where they take good care of her, and where I know she’s learning while I’m at work. I don’t have to worry. I don’t think any of us really thought we’d be here, knowing that our next generation is well taken care of.

Rodriguez: One of the most emotional moments on this journey was the day I was sworn in as a citizen. I still have all my papers: a copy of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the little flag they give you, and the letter signed by Barack Obama—who actually did sign my letter, I’m convinced of it.

Razaghi: It was really hard to establish a community. The other students in law school were nice, but I couldn’t befriend them because of the language barrier, and I didn’t know how to behave. The first time a girl hugged me, I had no idea what to do. In Iran or in Islamic countries, a man doesn’t touch a woman, especially hugging—that’s reserved for wives. But little by little, when I got my license, people were coming to me for their legal needs, and then they became friends.

The Law

Rodriguez: Originally I wanted to go to medical school, but I struggled because I had never taken math or science in English. Around that time, my then-girlfriend, who is my wife now, was studying for her LSATs and she said, “You’re better at this than I am.” There are a lot of interesting steps in between, but I went to law school at night while working as a judicial law clerk at the state’s attorney’s office. Being in trial was one of the best parts of that experience, and watching complex medical malpractice trials was extremely fascinating. As a would-have-been doctor, that experience stuck with me. You typically hear from the plaintiff’s bar, “I became a plaintiff’s lawyer because I wanted to help people.” I feel that way very much as a defense lawyer on the civil side.

Smith: My grandfather had a law degree, so I grew up hearing about law and tax issues. I wouldn’t say I cared about it very much growing up. My undergrad was in physics because I liked math and science. But then I spent a couple summers doing research with professors. The idea of doing research in a lab by myself for the rest of my life seemed very isolating. Really, how I ended up in the law was a process of elimination. First, I thought patent law because of my science background, but found that trust and estates is a good mix of law that had a lot to do with numbers, which I liked. I also like working with real people, not corporations.

Raquin: After seven years as a public defender, I wanted to expand. I have a relentless personality; I just don’t want to let go of specific things once I’m attached to an idea or client or a case. So I built a firm around expanding the scope of my professional development, because there’s just so much that I learned every day in criminal defense. I’m also quite proud to be the attorney liaison for drug court in Montgomery County. It’s court-supervised probation for clients who have substance use issues. The whole philosophy behind it is that if you can separate the disease from the person, and make sure the person is clean and sober, then you cure the criminal behavior. It’s really what I believe the criminal justice system should be about: providing resources to solve a problem instead of just punishing people.

Razaghi: Once I passed the Bar, I was 32, had no legal experience in this country, and couldn’t compete with lawyers who were born here. No firm was interested. They were like, “Yeah, you have some language skills, but we are not the CIA or the FBI. We don’t need someone who speaks Farsi.” So I started to educate myself about immigration law, because there is a huge community of Iranians in the United States.

The University of Baltimore had a legal incubator program where they basically supported and trained recent graduates to start their own practice, provided they agreed to pro bono work and committed to staying on their own for a few years. The criminal work opened my eyes to see how access to justice is very expensive in this country. And I saw that many, many people are struggling to defend their rights because they can’t afford a lawyer. I started to build my career and also continued my human rights work, basically promoting the human rights of people in the Middle East—especially Iran—trying to be a voice for the opposition against the human rights violations of the Islamic regime. I didn’t let them silence me.

Maintaining Tradition

Smith: We celebrate Durga Puja, a cultural religious holiday in October. It’s kind of like Christmas in the part of India where I’m from.

Razaghi: Iranians have been celebrating the first day of spring for thousands of years, called Nowruz. It’s like Christmas—everybody goes shopping, gives gifts to other people. When I came here, I didn’t have the financial means to celebrate it, but when I became a lawyer, I started my own celebration of Nowruz, renting big community centers. One year we had 240 people.

Raquin: The French legal system does not consider that a person should die in prison. These are not just French values, it’s also part of the European Convention on Human Rights. This is a common belief for many countries, that we think sentences have to be proportionate and reasonable and take into account the dignity of the human being. When I got to the U.S., my cultural shock was, “Oh my God, people get 30 years on robberies. So what do you get for murder?” This motivates the work that I do. I don’t believe in just locking someone up and throwing away the key.

The Final Word

Rodriguez: I count myself fortunate that at every step, I always seemed to run into people that wanted to help me, just for no apparent reason other than having this inherent sense that we are a land of opportunity.

Razaghi: Everybody in this country who heard my story showed me sympathy. That’s part of the reason I think I owe many things to this country. That’s why I’m spending lots of my time on pro bono cases. For years, I was the one who was using the tax money of the people; now I’m happily paying taxes.

Smith: My mother will tell you she wasn’t sure I would’ve even gone to college, not because I wasn’t smart enough, but financially. I happily married a white man, so there’s some cultural things that had to mesh for that to work. But I am the first non-white person in that family, and it never mattered. That wouldn’t be the case in many other places.

Raquin: I now feel American when I’m in France—a reverse culture shock. People are so much more friendly here. The education environment is much friendlier. From what I hear from my friends and family still in France, I feel it’s only here in the U.S. I could be myself as an individual and be the attorney I want to be.