Queens community rallies for citizenship reform
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New Immigrant Community Empowerment hosted a rally for pathways to citizenship last week. Photo courtesy of NICE
By Rachel Vick
A Queens-based advocacy group rallied community members and elected officials in Times Square last week to call for the inclusion of improved pathways to citizenship in the Build Back Better bill or other federal legislation.
The rally, organized by New Immigrant Community Empowerment, brought together dozens of advocates — and garnered the attention of passing cars and pedestrians, offering supportive cheers. It was the latest in a series of actions from NICE to bring attention to the lack of access to citizenship.
“It is us, immigrant workers who built this city, it us… who have helped the city survive a pandemic and continue to risk our lives,” said NICE Interim Executive Director Diana Moreno. “This is the year we are going to pass citizenship for 11 million people.”
Moreno celebrated the presence of U.S. Sen. Majority leader Chuck Schumer, who pledged to continue fighting for the inclusion of bills that would reverse restrictive policies from the Trump Administration, and create options for Dreamers, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and others with Temporary Protected Status to secure their permanent place in the U.S.
“The majority of Americans support our efforts to provide a path to citizenship for millions of hardworking immigrants in this country. They know this will raise wages, create good-paying jobs, enrich our economy, and improve the lives of all Americans,” Schumer said. “Despite recent procedural barriers, we will not stop in our push to fix our broken immigration system and provide a path to citizenship.”
While a number of Queens officials offered their support remotely, others were on hand to offer their support for the cause, including Assemblymember Jessica González-Rojas and recently sworn in Councilmember Julie Won, who recalled her family’s own journey to citizenship.
After coming to the U.S. when Won was eight years old, her parents worked for a decade to save money for the application and legal fees before becoming citizens. That experience was her first introduction to how “difficult and exclusionary [the process is] to those who would benefit the most from the protections of citizenship.”
“There are no benefits of being undocumented, we have neighbors in our community who live in fear every day, and are forced to work exploitative jobs without protections because they don’t have their citizenship,” Won said. “They deserve basic human rights, workers rights, government benefits and protections - most of all, they deserve to live without fear. Creating a pathway to an affordable and accessible pathway to citizenship is within reach, we just need congress to act.“
The push for more accessible pathways to citizenship is not limited to the major federal package. New York’s congressional leaders — including Rep. Grace Meng — have urged lawmakers to support individual legislation to ease the process. Among some of the proposals are information campaigns, waiving application fees and allowing virtual interviews and oath ceremonies.
