A Life of Its Own

In nearly four decades as an immigration attorney, Gerry Chapman has worked cases that have set lasting national standards. But it’s the lesser-known ones, involving abused or neglected immigrant children for whom he’s secured state custody orders so they can achieve lawful permanent residency, that stand out for him.

“It’s seeing the relief just wash over everybody’s faces once we walk out of the courtroom and we know we’ve got a custody order because we know the rest of the case is really a—not a slam dunk—but it’s just more or less a waiting game,” he says. “The change it makes in the lives of those children is just astounding. The gratitude that those children have, it just beams out of them.”

Chapman initially practiced family law, but once a fellow lawyer asked him to take an immigration case, he was hooked. One of his best-known cases was resolved in 2016. He represented Dr. Mookesh Dhanasar, an engineering professor at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. During his pursuit of a green card, a request for extensive evidence was made and Dhanasar’s petition was ultimately denied. Chapman and his team won on appeal.

“At the appeal level, it’s the Administrative Appeals Office,” he explains. “The AAO issued a request for evidence, which surprised me. We responded with almost as much evidence at that point as we had submitted earlier—it was just different factual information. … They were asking for new stuff, and we responded, and that’s why we got picked.”

The ruling set a precedent for National Interest Waiver cases by creating a new standard to qualify for those waivers. That standard continues to allow for increased NIW application approvals for immigrants in fields such as science, education and business. “One of the most significant parts of the case is that people who are entrepreneurs have a shot at those cases as well,” Chapman says.

“It’s still the leading case in that area,” he adds. “It’s got a life of its own.” And so does Dhanasar, who recently obtained his U.S. citizenship.

Today, Chapman’s practice focuses on waivers in business- and family-based immigration cases.  He has served as a trustee for the American Immigration Law Foundation, and chair of the Carolinas chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, helping their work on national immigration reform. He continues to write articles on the topic. “The argument these days that we ought to have mass deportation, I can’t believe that it’s serious, because the first thing that’s going to go down the tubes is our economy,” he says. “The theme behind the argument [for mass deportation] is ‘We’re a nation of laws.’ Well, in this case, we’re a nation of dysfunctional laws.”

He says the politicization of immigration has made it less likely for reform to be passed. “Immigration reform has been made radioactive by people who use it as a fear-mongering device. ‘They’re taking your jobs. They’re taking your house,’” he says. “It’s insane. It’s largely a fear-based argument.”

Reform starts with DACA and the students who “need a path to a green card,” Chapman says. Immigrants working essential jobs need a path as well. “When you need a carpenter or when you need a brick mason, those are highly desirable skills and can be financially rewarding, but our country is focused so much on higher education as ‘the solution’ for everybody’s kids that we have overlooked the dramatic importance of skilled labor.”

The challenges of immigration law can weigh on attorneys, and Chapman says he’s happy to see more emphasis on mental health in the practice, especially for younger lawyers. “It’s trying to make them realize that this is just a set of challenges, and it’s not the be-all, end-all of your life,” he says. “I think that’s a positive development in this practice.”

The Life Aquatic

Before his work in immigration law, Gerry Chapman was diving into the pool at the University of North Carolina as the co-captain of the men’s varsity team. He competed in the NCAA Division I Men’s Swimming and Diving Championships in 1970 and 1973 and was named an ACC champion in 1970.

He still swims today, placing in U.S. Masters Swimming meets and cracking the national top 10 in his age group in 2012. “Just like anybody who starts a sport and does it all the way through college, you tend to go back to it,” he says. “I’ve had good friends that I’ve kept through the years through swimming. At some meets, I’ll see those folks and we’ll laugh about the old days when we all could fit into smaller bathing suits.”

Greensboro Aquatic Center is Chapman’s home turf. “It’s a Cadillac,” he says. And an important part of the community. The former head of the Coliseum Complex, Matt Brown, started a program to teach every fourth grader in the county how to swim.

“So many inner-city kids drown because they don’t know how to swim,” Chapman says. “The main criticism about competitive swimming is it’s a white sport. And historically, that’s true. Matt Brown’s goal in life was to make it a multicolored sport, and we’re seeing that more and more all over the country and all over the world. But in Greensboro especially, there’s a mechanism to make that happen and save a lot of lives.”