by Kelly Simmons, Managing Editor and Senior Writer
The United States government is expected to send letters to 1.3 million legal residents across the country informing them that they must obtain citizenship or lose welfare services on April 1. There are 10.525 million legal residents in the United States but only 1.3 million both receive welfare services and meet federal requirements for becoming citizens. In order to keep receiving benefits such as food stamps, public housing, medical services and social security benefits, the new Immigration Reform Law requires citizenship status. The law is expected to have far reaching consequences for the estimated 898,000 legal residents in Texas and 42,000 legal residents in New Mexico. It is estimated that only 425,000 of Texas' legal residents are eligible for citizenship and 30,000 in New Mexico are eligible.
The reforms are expected to hit immigrant populations hard due in part to the fact that many legal immigrants are still uninformed about the new changes and the consequences of non-citizenship. The process of becoming a citizen can take between four and six months, according to the El Paso Immigration and Naturalization Service, (INS) meaning that those who have not yet applied for citizenship may lose months of benefits while waiting. Legal aid and immigration activists believe the law will hit the elderly and the handicapped the hardest.
Locally in El Paso, more than 167,000 legal permanent residents receive about $28.2 million in food stamps, as of June 1996, according to the Texas Department of Human Services. Residents who cannot show they were in the military or had about 10 years of Social Security earnings will be denied food stamp benefits, a spokesperson for the Department told the El Paso Times.
Applications for both permanent residency and citizenship are at an all time high, in response to the new changes. In the last quarter of 1996, citizenship applications in the El Paso immigration district, which includes New Mexico, was up by 75 percent over the number during the same quarter in 1995, from 3,083 to 5,400. Permanent residency applications also increased by 75 percent over the same period last year, from 1,268 to 2,213. The number of immigrants in El Paso who have become naturalized citizens rose from 9,000 in 1995 to 17,000, in 1996 and the INS is expected 2 million residents to become citizens during the 1997 fiscal year. The last time the United States has seen such a large influx of naturalized citizens was in 1986 after the passage of the Immigration Reform Control Act which granted legal status to 3 million undocumented immigrants who had been residents since 1982.
For more in this issue, please see related story in November issue.
Sources: Diario de Juarez, El Paso Times