Citizenship campaigns intensifying in Dallas for green-card holders
Citizenship campaigns are rolling out across the nation—and in the Dallas area, where there are nearly 160,000 legal permanent residents eligible to take that next step.
April is the national month of citizenship — an event championed by the American Immigration Attorneys Association. This morning, several groups joined the lawyers to spotlight the benefits of citizenship in a news conference at City Hall. The organizers say they want to be swamped by immigrants at a citizenship workshop this Saturday at Mountain View Community College from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
“Dallas is a very important city with high concentrations of legal permanent residents,” says Clara Ortega-Hogue, the Houston-based civic engagement organizer for the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and Educational Fund.
Nationally, there are 8.5 million legal permanent residents with green cards, eligible to be naturalized and, of course, harvested at voters. Texas contains about 1.3 million of those immigrants who may naturalize because they’ve met the general requirement of holding legal residency for five years. Naturalization events are held throughout the year by federal immigration officials, for orphans adopted by U.S. citizens, to refugees and immigrants from across the globe.
More than a dozen groups were listed as partners in the citizenship mission, including Catholic Charities of Dallas and Proyecto Inmigrante.
NALEO scored big success in 2007 when they helped lead efforts to naturalize 1.4 million persons around the nation with a Ya Es Hora/Now is the Time campaign. A pending fee increase propelled many to begin studying for the U.S. citizenship tests and to take the exam. Naturalization fees are now nearly $700.
The location for the citizenship workshop: Mountain View College gymnasium at 4849 W. Illinois Ave. in Oak Cliff. More information is available at Proyecto Inmigrante at 1-888-793-2182 or www.proyectoinmigrante.org