He graduated that summer and, pending his bar exam, secured a lowly but fulltime position with Honeyman Fleischer, his first professional employment since the army seven years earlier.

Honeyman Fleischer prided itself on its impeccable liberal credentials, and to prove its lively social conscience, fielded many pro bono assignments for the poor and vulnerable.

That said, the senior partners saw no need to exaggerate and kept their pro bono work to a few of their lowest paid newcomers. That autumn of 1978, Cal Dexter was as lowly in the legal pecking order at Honeyman Fleischer as one could get.

Dexter did not complain. He needed the money, he cherished the job, and covering the down-and-outs gave him a wide spectrum of experience, rather than the narrow confines of one single speciality. He could defend on charges of petty crime, negligence claims, and a variety of other disputes that eventually went to a court of appeal.

It was that winter that a secretary popped her head around the door of his cubbyhole office and waved a file at him.

"What's that?" he asked.

"Immigration appeal," she said. "Roger says he can't handle it."

Dexter's supervising associate chose the pro-bono cream, if ever any cream appeared, for himself. Immigration matters were definitely the skimmed milk.

Dexter sighed and buried himself in the details of the new file. The hearing was the next day.

9 The Refugee

There was a charity in New York in those years called Refugee Watch. "Concerned citizens" was how it would have described its members; do-gooders was the less admiring description.

Its self-appointed task was to keep a weather eye open for examples of the flotsam and jetsam of the human race who, washed up on the shores of America wished to take literally the words written on the base of the Statue of Liberty and stay.

Most often, these were forlorn, bereft people, refugees from a hundred climes, usually with a most fragmentary grasp of the English language, and who had spent their last savings in the struggle to survive.

Their immediate antagonist was the Immigration and Naturalisation Service, the formidable INS, whose collective philosophy appeared to be that 99.9 percent of the applicants were frauds who should be sent back whence they came, or at any rate somewhere else.

The file tossed onto Cal Dexter's desk that early winter of 1978 concerned a couple fleeing from Cambodia, Mr. and Mrs. Hom Moung.

In a lengthy statement by Mr. Moung, who seemed to speak for them both, translated from the French-which was the Frencheducated Cambodian's language of choice-his story emerged.

Since 1975, a fact already well known in the United States and later to become better known through the film *The Killing Fields*, Cambodia had been in the grip of a mad and genocidal tyrant called Pol Pot and his fanatical army, the Khmer Rouge.

Pot had some harebrained dream of returning his country to a sort of agrarian Stone Age. Fulfilment of his vision involved a pathological hatred of the people of the cities and anyone with any education. These were destined for extermination.

Mr. Moung claimed he had been headmaster of a leading lycŽe or high school in the capital, Phnom Penh, and his wife a staff nurse at a private clinic. Both fitted firmly into the Khmer Rouge category for execution.

When things became impossible, they went underground, moving from safe house to safe house among friends and fellow professionals, until the latter had all been arrested and taken away.

Mr. Moung claimed he would never have been able to reach the Vietnamese or Thai borders because in the countryside, infested with Khmer Rouge and informers, he would not have been able to pass for a peasant. Nevertheless, he had been able to bribe a truck driver to smuggle them out of Phnom Penh and across to the port of Kompong Son. With his last remaining savings, he persuaded the captain of a South Korean freighter to take them out of the hell that his homeland had become.

He did not care or know where the *Inchon Star* was headed. It turned out to be New York harbour, with a cargo of teak. On arrival, he had not sought to evade the authorities but had reported immediately and asked permission to stay.

Dexter spent the night before the hearing hunched over the kitchen table while his wife and daughter slept a few feet away behind a wall. The hearing was his first appeal of any kind, and he wanted to give the refugee his best shot. After the statement, he turned to the response of the INS. It had been pretty harsh.

The local INS Almighty in any U. S. city is the district director, and his office is the first hurdle. The director's colleague in charge of the file had rejected the request for asylum on the strange grounds that the Moungs should have applied to the local U. S. Embassy or Consulate and waited in line, according to American tradition.

Dexter felt this was not too much of a problem; all U. S. staff had fled the Cambodian capital years earlier when the Khmer Rouge stormed in.

The refusal at the first level had put the Moungs into deportation procedure. That was when Refugee Watch heard of their case and took up the cudgels.

According to procedure, a couple refused entry by the district director's office at the exclusion hearing could appeal to the next level up, an administrative hearing in front of an asylum hearing officer.

Dexter noted that at the exclusion hearing, the INS's second ground for refusal had been that the Moungs did not qualify under the five necessary grounds for proving persecution: race, nationality, religion, political beliefs, and/or social class. He felt he could now show that as a fervent anti-Communistand he certainly intended to advise Mr. Moung to become one immediatelyand as head teacher, he qualified on the last two grounds at least.

His task at the hearing in the morning would be to plead with the hearing officer for a relief known as Withholding of Deportation, under Section 243(h) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

In tiny print at the bottom of one of the papers was a note from someone at Refugee Watch that the asylum hearing officer would be a certain Norman Ross. What he learned was interesting.

Dexter showed up at the INS building at 26 Federal Plaza to meet his clients over an hour before the hearing. He was not a big man himself, but the Moungs were smaller, and Mrs. Moung was like a tiny doll. She gazed at the world through lenses that seemed to have been cut from the bottoms of CocaCola bottles. His papers told him they were forty-eight and forty-five, respectively.

Mr. Moung seemed calm and resigned. Because Cal Dexter spoke no French, Refugee Watch had provided a female interpreter.

Dexter spent the preparation hour going over the original statement, but there was nothing to add or subtract.

The case would be heard not in a real court but in a large office with chairs imported for the occasion. Five minutes before the hearing, they were shown in.

As he surmised, the representative of the district director represented the arguments used at the exclusion hearing to refuse the asylum application. There was nothing to add or subtract. Behind his desk, Mr. Ross followed the arguments already before him in the file, then raised an eyebrow at the novice sent down by Honeyman Fleischer.

Behind Dexter, Mr. Moung muttered to his wife, "We must hope this young man can succeed, or we will be sent back to die." But he spoke in his own native language.

Dexter dealt with the DD's first point; there had been no U. S. diplomatic or consular representation in Phnom Penh since the start of the killing fields. The nearest would have been in Bangkok, Thailand, an impossible target that the Moungs could never have reached. He noted a hint of a smile at the corner of Ross's mouth as the man from the INS went pink.