May 21, 2006

The sign on George Mann’s desk says: “We specialize in the impossible”.

For better part of two decades, the 58-year-old Romanian-born immigration lawyer in Farmington Hills has been doing just that, helping hundreds of immigrants obtain political asylum, avoid deportationand obtain documents to live and work in the United States. “The key to this country’s greatness is its mix of people from all over the world with different customs and the common dream to do something to improve their lives” Mann said this month after his selection as litigator of the year by the 300-member Michigan Chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Coincidentally, the award came just days after President George W. Bush addressed the nation Monday about the need to beef up U.S. borders to keep illegal immigrants out. He said he is putting 6,000 National Guard troops along the border with Mexico and starting a guest-worker program. Mann, who received the award at the organizations’s annual dinner Thursday, said it took three tries for him to get on the right career track.

He was born in 1948 in Transylvania, the son of Nazi death camp survivors. After the Communists took control of Romania, he said, his parents decided to leave. But it wasn’t until 1964, when American Jewish groups bought the freedom of thousands of Romanian Jews, that they immigrated to the United States as political refugees. Mann, who was 16 when he arrived, said it took him only about six months to learn basic English, although he never lost his distinctive Romanian accent. It took less than a year of working as an engineer at a meat company and at a steel plant to realize that he had made a bad career choice.

After friends told him he talked like a lawyer, Mann decided to enroll at the Detroit College of Law and obtained his law degree in 1974. Soon after, he opened a law office in downtown Detroit. But after three years of handling criminal cases, lawsuits and divorces, he said, he was unfulfilled as ever and quit to spend a year with his wife, Ann Mandelbaum, in Spain, where she worked on her doctorate degree. Mandelbaum, a Cuban refugee whom Mann married in 1975, runs an education al program in Pontiac for recent immigrants. They have four children. “To others, it probably didn’t look like I did very much the year I spent in Spain, but it was the best year of my life”, Mann recalled, adding that it gave him time to get his career bearings.

After returning to the United States in 1980, he opened an immigration law practice, becoming one of only a handful of Detroit-area lawyers practicing the specialty full time.

Mann said immigration law was a logical career choice given his immigrant roots, his knowledge of the world – he has visited some 40 countries – and his fluency in six languages. He said he has never looked back. At any given time, Mann estimated his staff of two lawyers, six paralegals and a receptionist has about 500 immigration cases working. He said he wins more often than he loses, which is difficult in a system that often works in favor of the government.

Another lawyer in his firm, Maris Liss, 40, a graduate of Columbia Law School in New York whom Mann hired in 2004, secretly nominated Mann for the litigator-of-the-year award after he won several immigration cases last year. “George has an amazing ability to look at an immigration case and see alternate strategies for handling it” she said. Liss said Mann’s success has produced a steady stream of grateful, tearful immigrants who routinely show up at the law office at 14 Mile and Farmington with hugs and pastries for the staff.

read here: Detroit Free Press, May 21, 2006 (pdf.)