Immigration, says Bradford-native Stephen Manning, is about “who belongs and who doesn’t.”

At its core, said Manning, stripped of the political rhetoric and the subjective definitions, that’s precisely what it all boils down to.

“The concept of belonging,” said Manning, should be the basis for all immigration debate. “How do you contribute to our shared prosperity?”

Both moral and economic prosperity, said Manning, needs to be evaluated, and each person that “belongs” in America should contribute to it positively. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works out.

Manning, voted Financial Times’ 2017 Legal Innovator of the Year, graduated from Warren Area High School. And it’s a lesson he learned from English Teacher Ruth Ann McKinney that has propelled him across the country and into a professional career with immense personal meaning.

During a lesson on “A Man For All Seasons,” according to Manning, McKinney posed the question: “If you take all of the laws away because you want to do one thing, what happens when they come for you?”

That question has stuck with Manning to this day, and it’s what has compelled him to fight for refugees and immigrants facing deportation.

Everyone is migratory, according to Manning. Whether through time, through space, or both, Manning said we all move from one place to another.

“When people ask me where I’m from,” he said, is to Warren? Is it Bradford? Or, asked Manning, is it Portland, Or., where he’s spent the last 30 years of his life?

“There’s this idea that where you’re born is where you belong. I don’t think that’s true,” Manning said.

Manning said that he was volunteering at the Touchstone Project, a mentoring and tutoring program in a Portland elementary school, teaching primarily Spanish-speaking children and their parents how to complete homework assignments.

When students stopped turning in homework, he said, he was stunned to learn that these second-graders were preparing for the reality that was deportation. “I didn’t realize that we actually deported” people that young, said Manning. It was a shock to his system. “That was insane to me,” he said.

After learning the reality that many people face, Manning said, he became a private lawyer, defending those facing deportation and preventing deportation where he can.

He also, however, has become the executive director of the Innovation Law Laboratory. Based in Portland, the Innovation Law Lab uses data analytics and project management tools that help determine where lawyers can win immigration and refugee cases.

In the span of two years, the Innovation Law Lab made it possible to go from a nearly zero to a nearly 99 percent success rate at freeing women and children from detention and deportation in the United States. His goal is to make sure that the extreme action of deportation isn’t going on without those being deported having legal representation.

The nonprofit matches refugees with lawyers willing to defend them pro bono. “It’s my job to learn about a person’s hopes, dreams, fears, where they’ve been in life, what they’ve done, and what they’d like to do,” and match their personal narrative with the law that will defend them.

“We’re in an era of mass incarceration and deportations,” said Manning. “And that’s really scary.” What concerns him most, he said, is that the infrastructure has been put in place at this point to support mass incarceration and deportation. Restructuring that apparatus of mass deportation, he said, is going to be difficult.

Immigration law itself, said Manning, is based on a 1960’s era statute. “It needs to be restructured,” he said.

And it’s the fate of deportation – the human experience of it – that keeps him working passionately for refugees and immigrants today. “It’s banishment,” said Manning of the human experience of deportation. Many of those being deported have lived their whole lives in America and know nothing else. “You’re expelled from your home. From everything you’ve ever known. You lose everything,” said Manning, including the intangibles that give us a sense of security – of belonging.

“It’s not a temporary punishment,” said Manning, “even though it sometimes is looked at that way.”

Manning said that when he makes it back to Pennsylvania, he’s always struck by the beauty of the region where he grew up. “I’m always struck by how beautiful it is. I didn’t really recognize it growing up. But there’s a lot of beauty there. In the land and in the people.” And returning home always reminds him of what it means to leave an area, and what it means to come to another area. That migration of people in and out of any community, he said, has meaning.

And it’s the meaning that both the presence and absence of those he works to help holds that keeps him working as he does.