RIP: David Carliner, Lawyer and Immigration Advocate

David Carliner, an influential lawyer, died of a heart attack at age 89 on Wednesday in Washington. Carliner handled some important immigration cases. One was the famous case of Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans racketeer whom the federal government after years of hearings and appeals finally deported in 1961. Another client, Staughton Lynd, was a Yale professor whose passport was canceled after he made a trip to North Vietnam. Carliner’s representation of a Chinese immigrant, Hay Say Naim, in a case involving Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law drew national attention in the early 1950s. In 1979 and 1980, Mr. Carliner fought legal battles for Iranian students studying in the United States who were trapped between the new fundamentalist government in their own country and the American authorities. In the 1980s, he separately represented a member of a death squad in El Salvador and a Nicaraguan immigrant who feared being drafted by the Sandinista government if forced to return to his own country. When Garry Davis returned from 30 years of wanderings using a world passport he had issued himself, Mr. Carliner won him the right to live in the United States.

According to the N.Y. Times, “Mr. Carliner’s battles were part of an overall effort to change and liberalize immigration policy. He fought the Reagan administration’s efforts to restrict the power of federal courts in immigration and asylum cases and in the 1990s campaigned against Congressional efforts to tighten immigration severely. In 1977, he published “Rights of Aliens,” which became a popular handbook on changes in immigration policy. In 1990, he and several colleagues came out with “The Rights of Aliens and Refugees,” (Southern Illinois University Press).”

KJ