Our History
In 1997, soon after the enactment of the Immigration and Welfare Reform Act of 1996, the CUNY Citizenship and Immigration Project was established to address the growing need for immigration services for CUNY’s foreign-born students, faculty, and staff. Following a tradition of community service, CUNY soon expanded the Project’s services to benefit all New Yorkers. Currently, the Project has nine immigration centers located throughout New York City and plans to open additional centers in the future.
The Citizenship and Immigration Project’s attorneys and paralegals provide one-on-one consultations in immigration related issues. We also hold Citizenship Now! events, which are community and campus events where we assist eligible members of the community with their naturalization forms. These services are available to the community in several languages, including English, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Portuguese, French, Italian, Korean, and Polish.
To further our initiatives, we have established alliances with various non-profit organizations and community leaders to help us reach out to a wider population of immigrants in need of legal assistance. Additionally, in conjunction with the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and with the Department of Youth and Community Development, we have created the NYC/CUNY Citizenship Corps. The Corps is a group of immigration experts who volunteer at our Citizenship Now! events to provide free naturalization application assistance to the community. The Citizenship Corps and our community events are at the heart of our outreach efforts.
Another of our achievements is the yearly CUNY/Daily News Citizenship Now! Call-In. This effort is organized by the Citizenship and Immigration Project and the Daily News to provide information about immigration issues to any person who calls in with questions.
In addition to our outreach efforts, we are committed to education. We organize seminars and trainings for our staff and volunteers on immigration issues. These classes are taught by experts from within the faculty and staff of the University.
Our Accomplishments
The City University of New York has the most comprehensive immigration law service and education program of any college or university in the United States. These efforts are led by the CUNY Citizenship and Immigration Project and its Director, Baruch Professor Allan Wernick. Our accomplishments include:
- Helping over 6,000 immigrants annually at our nine full and part-time citizenship and immigration centers, giving them advice and application assistance, and seeing them through to their citizenship swearing in ceremonies.
- Citizenship Now! events, during which we assist lawful permanent residents with their naturalization applications. These events are often sponsored by elected officials, community based organizations, unions and/or libraries. We help over 1,000 immigrants at these events.
- The CUNY/NYC Citizenship Corps that provides naturalization application assistance and immigration law counseling for immigrants in conjunction with community based organizations, elected officials, unions, libraries and CUNY campuses. The Corps currently is comprised of 1,300 members.
- Yearly citizenship and immigration law call-in with the New York Daily News. Over 15,000 people are help through the call-in annually.
- Trainings on citizenship and immigration law for the staff of elected officials and community based organizations.
- A collaboration with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to make CUNY campus facilities available to USCIS for naturalization swearing-in ceremonies.
- An Immigration Law Certificate program offered through CUNY’s School for Professional Studies (SPS) to provide high-quality, immigration law education to paralegals, human resource officers, staffs of elected officials, and to staffs of community based organizations (CBOs).
