Reginald Pacis still remembers his first paper at James Madison College. It came back covered in red ink, with a 1.0 at the top.
The professor was Ron Dorr, co-founder of Madison’s first-year writing program, known for grading that humbled even the strongest students. Pacis was, by his own account, disheartened.
Dorr, who was also his academic advisor, told him to stick it out for the term. While his friends told him he was killing his GPA, Pacis took Dorr’s class all three terms of his first year. The 1.0 climbed to a 1.5, then a 2.5. When a paper came back with a 3.0, he considered it a monumental feat.
“If I had to break it down, Madison taught me to think, read, speak and write critically,” said Pacis.
That foundation has carried him through three decades in immigration law. Pacis graduated from JMC in 1992 with a degree in political theory, then headed to law school, where the workload confirmed the need for the skills he’d developed at Madison.
“I surpassed all four years of high school reading during my first term at Madison,” he said. “And all the reading I did in college, including Madison, I exceeded that my first semester in law school.”
Today Pacis is a shareholder and attorney at Butzel Long and has practiced immigration law for 29 years, 26 of those years at Butzel Long. He chairs the firm’s pro bono committee and previously served as its hiring shareholder, a role in which a Madison resume on the desk told him something useful.
“I knew I had a good candidate when there was a Madison student in front of me,” he said. “I knew what their background was.”
The college also helped him develop friendships he has kept for decades. Pacis keeps in touch with friends he met at JMC through social media and occasional gatherings. Pacis and four classmates who met as students on the fifth floor of Case Hall take the opportunity for gatherings a little further.
For the past five years, this group has met in Michigan, some driving and some flying in, to stay at a home they rent for a weekend to watch a Spartan football game and play Dungeons & Dragons. They also play online every few weeks, but the game is mostly a pretext. What they really do, Pacis said, is debate current events the way they did in the dorm at 19. More than three decades later, the group includes a teacher, an Air Force veteran and three lawyers.
“I value those discussions,” Pacis said. “It’s just like when we were back in our late teens, early 20s.”
His connection to immigration law is personal, too. Pacis comes from a Filipino family that benefited from the U.S. immigration system. He remembers his grandparents staying up late to prepare for their naturalization ceremony, worried about reciting an oath he knew they could not get wrong.
“You’re having an impact on people in this field,” he said. “That stuck with me.”
The impact, he tells students interested in immigration law, is visible from the highway. Driving along I-96 or I-75 around Detroit, he sometimes passes manufacturing plants or office facilities connected to companies that began with two or three foreign nationals he helped find their path to the United States and that now employ hundreds of American workers.
Pacis describes immigration law as having three broad areas: removal defense, family sponsorship and employment sponsorship. Pacis practiced all three areas early in his career, including immigration court cases defending clients’ ability to stay in the country. Now he focuses on corporate and family work. The stakes of the work have remained constant. He has seen Ph.D.-level engineers face deportation because they treated the process as paperwork and filed the wrong form.
“It’s like performing heart surgery on yourself,” he said. “You wouldn’t do that. You’d have a professional do it.”
Madison shows up in his practice in less expected ways, too. Presenting at a national conference of immigration attorneys this summer, Pacis described temporary visa classifications as lifeboats that are slowly sinking, with clients moving from one to the next until they reach permanent residence. He credits the metaphor to the creative writing he practiced in Madison courses.
For students considering immigration law, Pacis starts with character over credentials. “You’ve got to have empathy for people,” he said. “If you don’t care about people, then you’re not going to be any good to anyone.”
After that comes attention to detail, a habit he honed at Madison, and the ability to think strategically. Getting a client legal status is one thing, he said. Protecting it is another. He tells clients and young attorneys alike to begin with the end in mind.
Pacis has had chances to move into other areas of law and other firms. He has chosen instead to stay with the field that shaped his career.
“Being an immigration lawyer is what I am,” he said. “I’ve had opportunities to try and get into other things. But at heart, I’m an immigration lawyer.”