Should Mexican immigrants be put to a different standard? Should illegal immigrants who attend college or join the military be able to obtain permanent residency? These were two of the many questions brought up in a wide ranging discussion held Friday when the Immigration Law Association brought UCLA Law Professor Hiroshi Motomura to campus.

Many of the questions Motomura answered came from students, but the two aforementioned ones originally came from the Obama-Biden Transition Team.

Motomura served the transition team as an outside adviser, giving his expert opinion on matters of immigration policy as the new administration tried to carve out what their positions would be. Despite the honor of being chosen to advise the transition team, the team was ambiguous about its goals and Motomura described the flow of information as a one-way street.

“It’s not as if they were telling us anything they were thinking of. They were asking for advice, but we could only infer from the nature of the questions what they were thinking.”

That did not stop Motomura from freely sharing his own thoughts with the students attending.

“The history of immigration law involves a lot of racial discrimination, and one of the things that people will look back at the middle of the 20th century somewhat triumphantly on is the fact that in 1965 we ended a selection process that was race based. Race based in the sense that it made immigration from outside Western Europe much more difficult. What emerged from this is that we treat all countries the same.”

That may sound hard to argue against, but Motomura added, “I think there’s now this idea of whether it’s really fair to treat Mexico the same as other countries.” Motomura expressed his belief to the transition team that this well-intentioned process was not fair in light of the geographical and historical relations between the U.S. and Mexico, which necessitated a process that took these factors into consideration.

Motomura also spoke more broadly about immigration law. When a student told Motomura about the difficulties he had found while exploring immigration law, Motomura responded that this makes practice in this area of law deeply satisfying, but also frustrating. “Reading the immigration statutes is in some ways much harder than reading the tax code,” he said, “and the reason it’s harder is that in many ways, it makes less sense.”

But, as he said, there are great benefits to working in this area of law to go along with the frustrating parts. “The reason this is so empowering and frustrating is that when you work with immigration clients, you realize how much you mean to them.”

Motomura went on to say that many of his students have told him that they would not be practicing law were they not able to work in the immigration area, from which they derive so much satisfaction. He added that a good mark of how much an immigration attorney means to their client is the close bond they form.

“A former student of mine told me that one of his clients named their first born child after my student,” he told a laughing crowd. “And I’ve never heard of a tax lawyer who could say that.”