The order is intended to encourage illegal immigrants to avail of city services like health care or police protection without fear of being deported. Critics of the mayor’s previous order said that the earlier policy left immigrants reluctant to report crimes, seek health care or send their children to school.
The new policy prohibits city workers in most cases from giving out information not just about an individuals immigration status, but also their sexual orientation, income tax records and welfare assistance, among other things. It also ends a running dispute between city council members and immigrant advocates stemming from the previous order the mayor signed in May. That earlier order overturned the city’s long-running “don’t ask, don’t tell policy” and allowed city workers to report illegal immigrants to the government.
“Immigrants have come to New York and written their own success stories by working hard and playing by the rules,” said the mayor at a ceremonial signing at City Hall. “They are the lifeblood of this city. Their contributions are beyond measure, and they have been — and will always be — welcome in this city.”
A broad coalition of New York immigrants’ rights groups gathered at City Hall last week to support the mayor and to express their strong support for the new policy on immigrants, praising the amended order as the strongest local confidentiality policy in the nation.
“Mayor Bloomberg’s policy does the right and smart thing for all New Yorkers,” said Margie McHugh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. “It rightly asserts that the only way to protect the health and safety of our city is to make sure that all New Yorkers feel safe interacting with government workers, be they police officers, firefighters, teachers, doctors and nurses or other city agency staff.”
Meanwhile, members of each of the city’s main immigrant communities also marked National Citizenship Day (Sept. 17) by joining together to protest the unprecedented backlogs and delays in immigration application processing under the Department of Homeland Security. Protestors called on President Bush to remove the growing roadblocks to citizenship. Six months after the DHS took over immigration functions from the INS with promises of better service, backlogs and delays have soared. The backlog of green-card applications nationally has now reached an all-time high of 1.2 million cases.
About 37 percent of New York City residents are foreign-born and 14 percent of families are thought to have at least one undocumented member. In New York, green-card applicants lucky enough to be approved must now wait more than three years for their applications to be processed — triple the amount of time it took just a year and a half ago.