101PD SAMPLEChapter 1 — The Map and the Interfaces: What Every California Lawyer Must Recognize Immigration Practice Essentials for California Attorneys — a 101PD training course. State Bar of California MCLE provider approval pending; no MCLE credit or certificate is issued. §1 The Course's Honest Scope — Recognition, Triage, and Interface Competence Immigration law is federal, specialized, and moving faster than any field this catalog teaches — and this course's scope is therefore drawn honestly at the outset. It does not make the reader an immigration practitioner; it makes the reader a California lawyer who recognizes the immigration dimension of the matter already on the desk, triages it without damaging the client, and runs the interfaces competently — because the immigration issue almost never arrives as an immigration case. It arrives as the criminal client weighing a plea whose immigration consequences dwarf the sentence; the family case whose child qualifies for findings only a state court can make; the employer whose I-9 audit letter has a California statute attached; the civil plaintiff whose deposition is about to be weaponized with a status question the Evidence Code forbids; the estate-planning client whose spouse's status changes every instrument's tax logic; and the walk-in who has already paid a "notario" for a filing that made things worse. The competence architecture, in this catalog's standing grammar: the diligence rule's three doors — learn it, associate it, or decline it — with this field's special weighting toward the second door, because the substantive law's velocity (enforcement priorities, procedural rules, program statuses, and fee schedules move on agency and litigation timelines measured in weeks) makes solo generalist handling of contested immigration matters a competence problem in most postures. The method the course installs, stated once and applied everywhere: every immigration-adjacent figure in this book is a framework fact bearing a verification date, not an answer — the practitioner confirms the current rule, from primary or expert-maintained sources, at the moment of advising, and the course's recurring artifact is precisely that verification habit, systematized. The one thing the generalist must never do, named in the first section because it organizes the whole course: never guess, and never let the client's urgency extract a confident answer the field's velocity has already invalidated — in immigration practice, the wrong reassuring sentence is the malpractice, and "let me verify that with current sources before you act" is the competent one. §2 The System's Architecture — Statuses, Agencies, and Tracks The federal system's map, held at recognition depth. The status taxonomy: United States citizens (by birth, acquisition, derivation, or naturalization — with derivation questions hiding in criminal and family files more often than anyone checks); lawful permanent residents (the green card's conditional variants and its abandonment and rescission vulnerabilities); nonimmigrants (the alphabet of temporary statuses, each with its terms, durations, and violation consequences); persons in undocumented status or with expired admissions (the entered-without-inspection versus overstay distinction carrying enormous consequence for available relief); and the protected-category population (asylees and refugees, temporary protected status