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THE RULE OF LAW ORAL HISTORY PROJECT The Reminiscences of Jameel Jaffer Columbia Center for Oral History Columbia University 2013 PREFACE The following oral history is the result of a recorded interview with Jameel Jaffer conducted by Ronald J. Grele on April 27, May 2, and June 4, 2012. This interview is part of the Rule of Law Oral History Project. The reader is asked to bear in mind that s/he is reading a verbatim transcript of the spoken word, rather than written prose. VJD Session One Interviewee: Jameel Jaffer Location: New York, NY Interviewer: Ronald J. Grele Date: April 27, 2012 Q: This is an interview with Jameel Jaffer. Today’s date is April 27, 2012. The interview is being conducted in New York City. The interviewer is Ronald Grele. Now, if you’ll just talk for a couple of minutes and I’ll just— Jaffer: Sure. I’m Jameel Jaffer. I’m a deputy legal director here at the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union]. We work on national security issues. Q: Terrific. I wonder if we can start with a little bit of your biography. You were born in Canada? Jaffer: I was, yes. Q: In Toronto? Jaffer: In London, Ontario, although I spent very little time in London—I think about eight months. Then my parents moved to Kingston, Ontario, which is halfway between Toronto and Montreal, right on Lake Ontario. I grew up there. I spent three years at boarding school in Toronto, then came down to the U.S. [United States of America] and more or less stayed here. Q: Just three years of boarding school? Jaffer -- 1 -- 2 Jaffer: Yes. I started high school in Kingston. Then after two years, I moved to Toronto. Q: What was your family like? Jaffer: Well, my parents are from Tanzania, so we’ve had several generations in Tanzania. Before that, Gujarat, in India—before there was Pakistan. Before partition. So on one side my grandfather left India and on the other side, my great-grandparents—they all came, or went, to Tanzania—what was then Tanganyika—in the early twentieth century. My mother’s family is from Dar es Salaam, which was the capital of Tanganyika and my father’s family is from Zanzibar. Both my parents moved to England for school—for university. Q: Were they part of that migration after independence? Jaffer: What happened was, Idi Amin had come to power in Uganda and—in Tanzania was actually never political upheaval on that scale. The prime minister was Julius [K.] Nyerere, who did many great things for the country but was a socialist and was nationalizing the property of Asians. My mother’s family had some property and they were worried about where all this was headed. So they, like many other people who had property, sent their kids out of the country. My mom went to England for that reason. My father’s family had no money but he got a scholarship to study pharmacy, so he went to London to do that. Jaffer -- 1 -- 3 They met at a party in London. My mother was then working for the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation]. She had sort of a backroom job at the BBC. She had been working for Radio Tanzania when she was in Tanzania. But they met in London, and then eventually decided to do what many Tanzanians with some degree of either wealth or education were doing at the time, which was to apply for visas to Canada, the U.S. and Australia. At the time, Canada was the easiest place to get into and they got into Canada on the condition that they live in a rural town. They initially started off in Barrie, Ontario, which is quite far north. For people who had grown up in Tanzania, to be deposited in northern Canada must have been a shock. But they lived in Barrie for a little while, then moved to London, Ontario, which is where I was born. Q: But you grew up in Canada. Jaffer: I was born there and I grew up there. Yes. Q: Were you religious? Jaffer: I’m not religious but my family is Muslim, Ismaili Muslim, which means that they are part of a Shia sect that follows the Aga Khan. My mother’s extended family is quite religious but what it means to be quite religious in Ismaili is quite different from what it means to be quite religious as any other kind of Muslim, really. The Ismailis are a relatively liberal sect of Islam. At least the ones in Canada, the United States, and England tend to be relatively well-educated, assimilated or integrated and also quite successful in business. That’s the community. Jaffer -- 1 -- 4 Q: When called upon, how do you describe growing up in Canada? Jaffer: Well, I think I was very lucky to have grown up in Canada. It was a very tolerant place and my parents were always very grateful to the liberal party, especially to Pierre [E.] Trudeau for having opened the doors to Canada at a time when many other countries were not that excited about accepting immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants from East Africa. Not everybody was opening their doors. I remember when Pierre Trudeau died, I was actually clerking. After I moved to the U.S., I worked here for a while, I went to law school and I actually moved back to Canada for a year to clerk for a judge on the Canadian Supreme Court in Ottawa. While I was there, Pierre Trudeau died and my parents were very upset about his death. In fact, much more upset about his death than they were about the death of some of our relatives. [Laughs] There were these long lines outside Parliament. Everybody wanted to pay their respects to Trudeau. I remember my parents calling me and asking me if I had yet waited in line. It hadn’t occurred to me to wait in that line until they called. But yes, I always felt very lucky to have grown up there. I never intended, actually, to stay in the U.S. It just sort of happened, as I think it does to many people. You move somewhere for a little while, then you build a lot of—you develop social and professional relationships there and it just becomes more and more difficult to leave. Jaffer -- 1 -- 5 Q: When you were still in Canada, prior to going to college, what did you think your world would be? Who were you going to be? Jaffer: I had always had a very strong interest in business and finance. My father is a pharmacist but he bought his pharmacy. Then my parents bought the commercial plaza in which the pharmacy is located and they became small time real estate investors and commercial landlords. It’s a very typical story. Q: It’s not an unusual story. Jaffer: No, not at all. Especially for Ismailis who came from East Africa. It’s a relatively large community in Canada. I think at this point there are probably two hundred thousand Ismailis in Canada. But this story is sort of the prototypical one. There’s nothing at all surprising about it. I think most first-generation Canadians with that kind of background saw business and finance as the obvious route. I certainly thought that, at least through most of college. Not because I’d decided on that but just because it was the obvious thing. That said, when I went to college I was not an economics major or anything like that. I studied math and English but I did that not because I thought I was going to be a mathematician or an English professor something like that but because I enjoyed those things. I still thought I would one day eventually end up at an investment bank or something like that, which I did, briefly. Q: As you were talking, I thought it would be logical to go to Williams [College], because they have such a sterling economics department. Jaffer -- 1 -- 6 Jaffer: They do have a good economics department and I did take a few economics classes, but I ended up being more interested in— Q: They have more economics majors than any other major. Jaffer: Is that right? Q: Yes. Jaffer: Well, they also have a very strong math department. They don’t have a research program because it’s a college, not a university, but they have a very strong teaching staff in the math department. I don’t know what the numbers are but they have a lot of math majors. More than most other liberal arts colleges. People told me that if one day you want to be an economist, it’s not going to hurt you to have studied math. I enjoyed doing the math more. Not that economics wasn’t challenging but I found the math more challenging and more interesting. I ended up spending more time doing that. But it wasn’t with the thought that I would one day be a mathematician. I never had that kind of talent. Q: A friend of mine once described it as one of the best-kept secrets of the American upper class. Williams. Jaffer -- 1 -- 7 Jaffer: Williams. It’s not as snooty an establishment now as it used to be. When I went there it was still during the transition from real snootiness into kind of a more open educational establishment. But now when I look at all the materials, even the changes since I went there seem pretty significant.