Update: I just started part-time work back in my original rent career as an editorial assistant on a peer-reviewed publication. Give me scientists, researchers, engineers, and doctors any day of the week over immigration lawyers! Ack. 10/8/21

The Best Worst Writing Job Ever

At least I made some people’s lives a LOT better

I’ve been writing and drawing since I could hold a crayon and talk about reading! I was a little vacuum cleaner of words. But for years and years, I fretted that I wasn’t really a writer.

Even after placing as a finalist in a writing competition I had my doubts. Even after having several stories published in literary reviews I wasn’t convinced.

After all, it’s not as if I got paid.

Four years of drafting, revising and submitting petitions to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS or simply The Service) for, ahem, “aliens of extraordinary ability in the arts, science, and business” took care of all those pesky doubts.

Extraordinary Ability. What’s that?

That’s the ticket for thousands of hopeful (mostly young) creatives from around the world striving to work in the U.S. every year. The O-1 employment visa or the EB-1 permanent residency status (aka the Green Card) opens the door to the promised land: being able to work at the top of their profession in the United States. The only thing these ambitious, talented, and fiercely determined people have to do is convince some poor overworked schlub in St. Albans, Vermont that they are Extraordinary. How do they do that?

This is where I come in. Allow me to introduce myself:

The writer of over one hundred successful O-1 and EB-1 petitions from 2014 to 2018. The Service generally doesn’t say no when a petition is submitted. They either say “yes” or “prove it” which means they want more evidence.

That’s called a Request for Evidence and it’s bad news. In my years as a writer for a series of immigration law firms my petitions were only served with three RFE’s and I proved all three. Other than those three all my clients received their visas or Green Cards on the first go.

Where does one find work in this obscure little corner of the legal universe? On Craigslist, where else?

In 2013 my 12-year stint as Editorial Assistant on a peer-reviewed scientific journal was being eliminated due to “budgetary considerations”. My boss clued me in a year ahead of time but by mid-2014 I was getting desperate.

I had job alerts on everything under the sun but I also always kept an eye on Craigslist. And it was there that I found an ad for a company seeking a fiction writer (I couldn’t believe it either). A tiny immigration law firm down in the Brooklyn needed a writer who could say “Give this person an O-1 visa immediately; they are Extraordinary!” in a thousand different ways.

I got the job.

$15 per hour, 20 hours a week, a laptop, no fixed workspace and off I went into my new career as a Legal Writer. Some days I got to work in the conference room with the killer view of the Brooklyn Bridge but often I wound up stuck in a corner somewhere. In between photocopying and collating massive stacks of paper, I revised letters of recommendation.

About Letters of Recommendation.

Subsequent immigration lawyers I wrote for would never trust the petitioner’s recommenders to write these letters. Good God, no. They’d be going on and on about winning personalities and that, darn it, their former student or co-worker was just really extraordinary. Not only that they were smart. They were kind. They paid their rent on time every month.

That is not extraordinary.

But this place let the recommenders give it their best shot and then I was brought in to clean it up. The aim of these letters is to describe the extraordinary accomplishments of the client and link them to prize-winning productions, organizations, and/or individuals. I discovered the power of suggestion and spin that never required dishonesty (Rule #1 in immigration law: Do Not Lie).

I lasted about five months and got one raise. Then, mysteriously, there was no work. No clients. Too bad. So sad. I worked for my last two weeks for two monthly unlimited Metrocards.

My Failure to Schmooze

The next place was in Midtown and I fully expect that should I die and go to hell it will be Midtown in New York City. What a horrible place to work. No matter where you walk on what sidewalk there’s some maniac with a suitcase on wheels who is going to run you down. And let’s not even talk about the lunchtime feeding frenzy.

This was a full-time job with my own dedicated workspace. The administrative assistant had told me the position started at $52k a year but the partner who offered me the job said it started at $45k.

Ok.

The chair was too low and there was not enough light. At lunchtime, on my first day, I went over to K-Mart and got some chair cushions and a small bedside lamp. I was ready to go.

I had aced their “test” so I was fairly confident I would be able to do the work.

Boy, was I wrong.

The first day I was assigned an entirely new task: write the cover letter for an O-1 petition. This is the major document that holds the entire petition together. There is a very specific structure and logic to the cover letter and for weeks I would get mine back bleeding with red corrections.

I had been honest with them about not having ever written such a beastie before and hoped they would give me time to get up to speed. They did not. Worse, when two different people assigned jobs to me and I missed a deadline because of it I got spanked but good. It probably didn’t help that on Friday nights when the bosses bought dinner for the office and brought out the wine I scarfed down my food and got the hell out of there.

Oops. Six weeks and I was out the door.

Next!

Next, I hit what I thought was a jackpot.

TWO part-time gigs with two very different immigration law firms. One was still in Midtown (oh well) and only worked with German clients. The other was in Astoria and I made it clear in the interview that I was a W2 employee or I was not working for this firm.

The gig with the Germans only lasted about a month but when they let me go it was not me, it was them. Huh? Whatever. At least they paid me through to the end of the pay period so I got three extra days’ pay.

I was gaining traction at the job in Astoria, however. At first, I worked from home schlepping back and forth with piles of evidence and drafts of letters of recommendation, cover letters, and petitioner letters to unions.

Here’s a cozy racket for you. In order to be permitted to work in the US, petitioners have to get the go-ahead from the union or trade organization that oversees their industry at anywhere from $250 to $600 a pop.

Non-refundable.

This involves organizing a mini-petition according to the various guidelines of each union, sending it off, and hoping they get it back in a timely manner. Nudging is counterproductive.

Now the lawyer in Astoria was an ADHD-addled perfectionist who couldn’t finish a sentence, lost his phone at least twice a month, and sent every document back to every writer with multiple corrections. Try as I might to get the hang of what he wanted it never was enough.

Eventually, I understood that his corrections were his way of organizing the legal argument he was trying to make. He never seemed impatient with three, four, even six back and forths of the work. A real downside was the fact that we’d often have to print out the same material over and over because he kept misplacing it.

Work was picking up and I was brought in full time on site, sharing a tiny office with two other writers. There were three writers, two interns (interchangeable, coming and going) and a take-no-bullshit office manager. Whatever success that lawyer enjoyed during that year and a half we were the ones who made it happen.

Let’s talk about the clients here.

This was the part of the job I absolutely loved. I have written successful O-1 and EB-1 petitions for (ready?):

Famous telenovela actresses; internationally awarded choreographers; a Mongolian heavy metal musician; rock star barbers; a retired soccer superstar establishing a soccer academy; modern dancers; classical ballet stars; every description of creative designer; award-winning nail stylists; movie directors; industrial designers; a Polish dissident writer with his own private security detail; cinematographers; illustrators; an Albanian dentist who specialized in full facial reconstruction after working pro bono in war zones; art-shipping logicians; screenwriters; fashion designers; still photographers doing behind the scenes shots at music video shoots; comedians; videographers; massively popular Israeli children’s show stars; graphic designers; animation artists; composers; architects; a marine biologist; lighting specialists; portrait artists; sound designers; and a motivational speaker who survived an un-survivable industrial accident.

With each petition, I got to learn everything about that client’s discipline. I was a great interviewer and became an ace researcher. Then I took all their evidence, their story, their accomplishments and built it all into an irrefutable argument for their Extraordinary Abilities.

I learned how to spin each sentence, each word, in such a way that I connected my client with the big hitters in their profession. It was engrossing and satisfying as hell. I got really good. Clients loved me.

Now let’s talk about the lawyers.

Yeah.

After over a year and a half and countless successful petitions and happy clients that lawyer in Astoria decided to (illegally) categorize me as an independent contractor.

In order to make it look like I was actually a contract worker, I was working from home again and schlepping to his office for weekly meetings. About a month prior to this I’d interviewed with another one-lawyer immigration firm not far from the Flatiron Building but after getting a very nice little Christmas cash bonus decided to stay on with the Astoria prince of ADHD. That changed right quick when I found myself back in 1099-land.

So I jumped ship. And landed in a world of hurt.

I don’t think I’ll ever know what this guy’s problem was but within a month he was calling me names. I was “dense” and “unteachable”. He began insisting that I punch out to use the bathroom.

Every day was a new kind of torture because I never knew what would set him off. To this day when I get to work and am waiting for my Outlook to open, my stomach sinks a little even though no one has sent me scathing, mean, sarcastic emails since I quit that job without notice via email.

On to the next one-lawyer immigration firm (I did an interview with some larger firms but my lack of experience with other types of visas kept me from escaping the loonies). And, yes, I landed with another loony. She seemed pretty ok and promised that I would be a proper W-2 employee.

Except she never bothered getting me an ID to get into the building so every morning I had to line up with the visitors and get a temporary pass. Except she never put me on the payroll and paid me with personal checks. Except after the first week, she decided to pay per case.

Except that the office was so aggressively air-conditioned that I was wearing a sweater, a hoodie, and a hat in July. After four months of this nonsense, she decided she didn’t have any work for me.

Am I the problem here?

After all, the one thing each job had in common was me. Some of the other writers I worked with are still slogging away with one or another of these nightmares. But most aren’t.

In four years I worked with six different immigration law firms. I ate one of the most intimidating learning curves of my life and managed to help a lot of people attain their dream to work at the pinnacle of their profession in the US. I still get thank you notes when former clients find me on LinkedIn.

I went on to revising college admissions essays for a consulting agency for about six months. It was a straight-up 1099 gig with no empty promises. I delivered top quality work, hit every deadline and got paid at the end of each month. No name-calling. No endless re-writing. Clearly, I wasn’t the problem with this job.

And on my current job it’s clear that, again, I’m not the problem.

I’m back to doing editorial coordination for a peer-reviewed scientific journal. I have a good salary, great benefits, my own office, and a boss who behaves professionally. It’s not my dream job but, baby, it is my dream paycheck. Unfortunately, no one clued me into the fact that this is actually a temporary position and goes away at the end of September 2019.

I really miss writing for a living. I miss working with motivated, hungry, creative people who are eager to get a shot at something big. I miss how the hours fly when I’m so focused on developing my argument and backing it up with the evidence. I miss how great it feels when USCIS sends an approval.

I do not miss working with insecure, unstable, dishonest, and often outright unpleasant people. So now I get up early every morning to write and publish on Medium before work. And I no longer feel sick to my stomach on Sundays.

And who knows? Maybe as I’m dropping my resumes and cover letters into the abyss daily there might be another writing job waiting for me. And until someone’s ready to hire me as a writer I’ve always got Medium.

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