I grew up in West Germany; my wife is from China, my father from Austria, my mother from Bolivia. I attended my 11th grade in Colombia; after graduating I went to Moscow for one and a half year of social work. Then I decided to become a lawyer to work on global human rights issues. At the end of my studies I realised that there were only a few human rights issues in Germany, but one of them was immigration-related. Suddenly I remembered that, when I was little, my Bolivian grandma was banned from German for life, because she had accidentally overstayed her visa for a couple of days, that my mother, a doctor trained in Bolivia with work experience there, had to work below market-conditions for 15 years until she became fully recognised and allowed to open her own practiced. Since then I have been working full- or part-time in immigration. To gain corporate experience I also worked for almost eight years in the financial services industry as a tax lawyer. Still, I found my activity in immigration more fulfilling and committed to it full-time.